The Drydock – Episode 282

00:00:00 – Intro

00:00:49 – Updates to previous questions on mines!

00:03:40 – ABXY 15″ ships with triple turrets?

00:08:31 – Between World War I and World War II, did the Swedish Navy ever fire their guns in defense of their Homeland, or to defend themselves?

00:09:27 – Difference between Swedish coast defence and the Jeune Ecole?

00:17:08 – Lots of UK science museums I’ve been to have large ship models in glass cases. How, if at all, do you spot the submerged torpedo tubes on the models?

00:19:16 – What is the truth to the claim that Rome’s voracious appetite for timber to build the fleets of the Punic Wars caused the denuding the southern Italy and thus the degradation of its soil such that it become much poorer agriculturally and the enfeeblement of that region we know of today?

00:23:15 – Why were 6″ DP guns not invented in the inter-war period?

00:27:25 – Was there a design for a unified battery warship in the Age of Sail?

00:32:46 – Did any navies deploy any rates that acted as tenders for resupply or repairs to other rates, or was it easier to just rely upon ports around the planet?

00:35:56 – Why was it so hard to get nations to upgrade their shipbuild infrastructure?

00:43:42 – Admiral Walker?

00:48:14 – Would the Italian Aquila and Sparviero carriers decisively changed things in the Mediterranean theater if they had been completed by the start of the war or even by 1941?

00:51:37 – How accurate are the depictions of the submarine, sea mines, and torpedo in Finding Nemo?

00:54:42 – Would it be possible to call the Battle of Cape Engaño a Japanese victory given that the Northern Force completed their objective?

00:58:32 – The importance of crew!

01:03:11 – How long in advance before firing could you load an age of sail cannon without degradation of the powder charge, since it would no longer be in it’s protective storage unit and may be subject to moisture in the air?

Hello everybody and welcome to the dry do episode 282 this week the questions are taken from Guides 352 and 353 that’s on the Swedish coastal defense dis geten I think uh I possibly have forgotten how to pronounce that and Aon which is much easier to pronounce along

With Wednesday videos on the first Punic War and ship classifications in the age of sale with a guest question from the Halifax Naval Museum tour so with that said let’s go on with questions but before we start with questions for this week just a quick update to a question

That was asked in a previous dry do a week or two ago about mines and how you ensure that they are at the correct depth in various depths of water and a couple of people reached out and pointed out that I had neglected to mention a particular form of mind that

Was in use in the first part of the 20th century and so I’ll mention that here and that is the plummet mine so the plummet mine if you’ve ever seen mines on a mine layer or perhaps in museum you will see sometimes they’re just on their own and

Other times you’ll see them sitting on what looks like a metal box now this metal box is usually the anchor and this type of arrangement is usually where you will find a plummet mine now the way a plummet mine works is you have the mine sitting on the anchor

The box and then you kick it over the side and you have a plummet line which hence the name which is attached to said box and that plummet line is set to the depth you want the mine to sit at so let’s say 20 ft at this point both the mine is

Buoyant and the Anchor Box is also buoyant because there’s air in it the plummet line pays out it reaches let’s say R 20t depth and when it reaches that depth it also mechanically opens up the Anchor Box to be flooded which so now the Anchor Box is negatively point it starts to

Sink and then as it sinks obviously at some point the plummet line which is weighted comes in contact with the seabed and then that line goes slack and when that line goes slack then that releases a clamp which clamps onto the moing cable for the mine which has been

Paid out as the anchor sinks and the mine itself has stayed on the surface so now you have a situation where you have the mine on the surface a now clamped in moing line between it and the sea anchor and or anchor and the Anchor Box is now

20 ft above the surface of the seabed and then of course the anchor continues to sink because the moing line is not being paid out anymore that means the mine is dragged down and thanks to the the way the whole system works it means that as long as you have a long enough

Moing line you can Chuck binds overboard and they will in theory all sit at the preset depth you want them to be in this case 20 ft so thanks for people for pointing that out to me um somehow I had forgotten about them but now you know

The man formerly known as commenting is what I do asks an amendment to a previous question I asked and you answered in dry do 262 between the Queen Elizabeth’s hood and bismar which would benefit the most from going to Triple turrets I meant to say that you could make other

Modifications to them to accommodate this they just had to retain the a bxy turret Arrangement does this change your answer in any significant way okay so if we’re allowed to make revisions to the design I make the ships a bit beier and therefore also need a bit longer a bit

More Machinery Etc but we’re keeping the armor and speed Target speed the same in that case I think the Queen Elizabeth’s probably could have benefited the most um partly because of their exceptionally long lifespan historically and part because of what that would have enabled so there I mean there’s a lot of

Things that could be improved for any of the designs if they upgraded and become larger to fit triple turrets instead of twins but with the qes there’s two very specific incidents or circumstances I guess where potentially huge differences could be made first of all is it Jutland because if you’re increasing the

Firepower of every single QE by 50% by going from eight guns to 12 guns and you know they’re keeping as I said their speed protection Etc then that means you essentially when you look at the run to the South and fifth battle Squadron showing up the

Amount of damage they were able to do you’re effectively adding another two queen elizabeths to that equation in terms of absolute Firepower which makes it statistically significantly more likely that they will deal quite bad damage to the first scouting group the German battle Cruisers which could have quite an

Interesting effect on the way that Jutland goes thereafter um and then obviously you’ve got the fact they’re engaging the lead portion of the high seas Fleet as well you know there’s a lot of things that could be done you know if you essentially say what in

Other terms is is the effect of adding another two Queen Elizabeth to that melee but then you also have the fact that going forward you presumbly got these ridiculously large vessels compared to what they would be historically but going forward in time to the 1930s a given that the hood design was

Sort of cribed off of the q- RS there’s a higher chance that hood inherits triple turrets anyway because the starting point is the qes but even if it doesn’t when you get to the 1930s and the modernizations that are undertaken well obviously for a start

Having a 12 15in gun ship is going to be significantly more useful than having a 85in gunship but I mean and this is obviously for the sake of ease of argument ignoring the massive KnockOn effects that having a ship that large and that powerful would have on things like the

Washington Naval treaty but regardless what you might also find is that whilst the radical modernizations that were done to war Queen Elizabeth and Valiant didn’t extend as far as removing part of the main Armament because ultimately a sixgun ship does have some significant disadvantages if you have a 12 gun ship

And they’re looking at well we need to modernize these ships to stay in the fleet for another 5 10 years and everybody is restricted to 35,000 tons for their fast Capital ships and people building things like Loro bismar rila North Carolina etc etc it does lend a possible

Modernization route wherein you remove X turret the super firing after turret and all that’s associated autore and extend the Machinery spaces because that might then allow you with a few revisions to the H to push the ships up to 27 28 knots I.E make them competitive with

Modern fast Capital ships and at that stage removing a single turret still leaves you with nine 15in guns which is a very creditable Armament at which point you’ve just added three whole new Fast Capital ships to the Royal Navy’s inventory for World War II and that could make a huge difference to what

Then happens Christopher Babylon asks between World War I and World War II did the Swedish Navy ever fire their guns in defense of their Homeland or to defend the ships themselves not as far as I’m aware about the closest you would have gotten would have been the whole alland

Island issue in 1918 at the in the latter stages of World War I and several Swedish coastal defense ships did show up there to obviously support Sweden’s interest in that particular particular dispute but as far as I can tell I don’t think they actually actively shot at

Anybody so that will be about the closest I think but to be fair that’s not really a mark against the Swedish Navy because of course the best form the best way you know a deterrent Navy has succeeded is if it doesn’t actually have to do anything other than deter things

You know if someone’s actually attacking your deterrent Navy then a certain amount of your deterrence has already failed nikujaga oi I think asks you compared Jero with the Swedish approach of miniature Capital ships in earlier videos and seem to consider the latter as a more practical Doctrine with a case

Study of the Cs Marina being cautious about the potency of the sparia class but why aren’t the Core Concepts of the genol and the Swedish Navy in the 20th century pretty much the same with the only difference in execution wouldn’t the Germans be reluctant to face loads

Of torpedo boats and a vastly superior opponent that can pretty much adapt to an overcome anything the na a Navy that follows the genol throws at it which you suggest is the jol’s major flaw can also do the same against these ships anyway there are a few reasons why I consider

The Swedish Navy’s approach superior to the jeno idea firstly the Swedish Navy strategy in the first part of the 20th century is a pretty much purely defensive approach which has different structures built into it compared to the genol which whilst it has a defensive element the jol is ultimately a an offensive

Approach the jol was designed obviously by the French to allow them to destroy the Royal Navy even though France’s economy and ship building were in a position where they couldn’t match the Royal Navy in their traditional battle Fleet and an offensive Doctrine requires you to have ships that can fight battles

That a defensive only Doctrine doesn’t you know like battles out out on the high seas and that’s one of the areas where the junle falls down because the Swedish defensive Doctrine although it’s anchored around miniature Capital ships like the spas and the their predecessors is an integrated and interlocking system

Which has some destroyers and torpedo boats involved it has minefields involved it has these small Capital ships involved and it has Coastal defenses big coastal defense guns all integrated into an overlapping network of Defense which is much greater than the sum of its parts whereas the janol

With its pure Reliance on torpedo craft and cruisers and most of the Cruisers are supposed to be out doing Commerce rating under absolutely pure genol physically is incapable of doing that for one thing the genol doesn’t even have something of a similar caliber to the sparas uh which is a bit of a

Disadvantage but secondly if it comes down to a battle if you’re fighting in the Open Seas if you’re going on the offensive which is what the junle espouses you to be able to do you can’t have an integration with minefields because you’re on the move you can’t have an integration with Coastal

Defenses because well they’re back on your coast and if you end up fighting a defensive War then you lack the heavy Firepower of a coast defense ship like AIA you might have minefields but the jle doesn’t really look into them quite as much as Swedish Doctrine does and it’s that overlapping concept that

Really works because yes the Germans would be a little bit reluctant to face lots of torpedo boats but the counter to lots of small fast attack craft apart from just having more small fast attack craft of your own is things like Cruisers with rapid firing guns because

They will outrange and out outshoot your the torpedo boats the fast attack craft and Destroy them pretty easily or you know going back to the early uh to the late 19th century secondary and tertiary and quary batteries on brw dreadnots as well and so on and so

Forth and there’s not really much of a reply the jol has to that because if you send in the Cruisers of the jol then they’re not a they’re not doing Commerce rating B A Commerce rating configured Cruiser is probably going to lose compared to a cruiser that’s designed

For straight up Fleet combat and three the Cruisers are nice big targets for the battleships which your torpedo craft are trying to syn whereas if you were to look at a a swarm of torpedo boats let’s say in the Swedish context if you sent in a light Cruiser

Or several to try and deal with those the Spas would be able to quite comfortably deal with those light Cruisers and if you sent in something big like a Heavy Cruiser or an armored Cruiser depending on the time period you’re looking at the sparas can still challenge them and the coastal defense

Guns will help out and if you send in something really big like a pre- dreadnut battleship or later on a dreadnut then the sparas can still hurt them the coast defense guns can still hurt them and the minefields can Channel them into areas where they are now a

Disadvantage and the torpedo armed fast attack craft can leverage their weapons against them essentially what it comes down to is that there are many possible responses to the Jen call and some of them are pretty simple like I said either you just out build your opponent

In the same classes of ships or you can do that or match them and build counters like Fast firing Cruisers and battleships with secondary batteries and that’s not difficult for a large Navy to do whereas with the Swedish coastal defense Doctrine because they as long as they’re building Coast defense ships and

Um Coastal defenses which pretty much stops in by the 1920s but as long as they’re doing that and as we see with the CR Min evaluation even with the Legacy effect afterwards the overlapping nature of having Minefield torpedo craft big guns larger ships and even bigger guns on Coastal defenses means that

There is no one easy counter to the Swedish Doctrine the only way you’re going to get past uh the Swedish defensive Doctrine is to throw a well what on land would be called a combined arms offensive against them because you you’ll need your heavy ships to take out

The coast defense ships and the coastal defense in placement you’ll need your Cruisers to deal with their torpedo craft you’ll need your own torpedo craft to potentially deal with the Swedish heavy ships before they do damage to your heavy ships which compromise your ability to take out the coast defenses

You need M sweepers and you need more ships to cover the M sweepers and so on and so forth which means you’re having to commit a very significant amount of resources from all sorts of vessel classes across the fleet to essentially just overwhelming entrenched defense with numbers which is going to be very

Costly and yes an very large Navy could afford to soak those up but that kind of requires you to have a very very l L Navy comparative to the Swedish Navy whereas if all you have is a larger Navy like the cigs Marina had it may not be

Worth it because it may sap much of your if not all of your strength to do so and hence the deterrence effect has worked whereas yeah as I say if Sweden had gone with a purely jico style approach The Creeks Marina well obviously there’s other political factors and Etc as to why

Germany doesn’t go after Sweden but the Creeks Marine’s evaluation almost certainly would have said yeah we can deal with that not really much of a problem I mean hey a Swedish junic call style defense you might actually have found to use for the kbgs Matthew Griffith asks lots of UK

Science museums I’ve been to have large ship models in glass cases how if at all do you spot submerged torpedo tubes on the models well of course it depends on the Fidelity of the model but most of the big ones that you find in museums are usually Builders models or similar

Like this one of h m Doris an eclipse class protected Cruiser which you can find in the National Mariton Museum in Grenich and London and assuming it’s a relatively High Fidelity model then you look below the waterline for a hatch looking object so in this particular case you can

Actually see it relatively clearly albe it’s a little bit of a small detail so if you’re looking at the model in the picture while going from the bow head along the bow to what from a perspective position looks like it’s just after the bridge but in actuality it’s pretty much

Adjacent to it and you’ll see the foremost of the wing mounted guns now go down and just above the waterline you’ll see what looks like a little chain or possibly a black line if you’re looking at a mobile phone and then follow that line down and you’ll see there is a

Little hatch and then if you take a closer look as I have shown you with this pH photo you can see that that hatch is that’s the cover for the underwater torpedo tube there’s pretty much only one reason to have a hatch of that size below the water

Line and actually in this same Gallery in the National Maritime Museum they have a model of SMS emden which shows similar underwater torpedo tubes and as you can see here they are in near enough the same position actually so there you go if you’re looking for underwater

Torpedo tubes this is the kind of artifact you’re looking for on a large model and also while it’s not necessarily always going to be in this position a lot of ships that do have broadside underwater torpedo tubes this is roughly the area of the ship you know just just underneath the forward bridge

Superstructure where you want to start looking B Griffin asks what is the truth to the claim that Rome’s voracious appetite for Timber to build the fleets of the Punic Wars caused the denuding of southern Italy and thus the degradation of its soil such that became much poorer agriculturally and thus the enfeeblement

Of that region we know today well whilst it probably didn’t help I don’t think specifically the Punic Wars fleets are responsible for the deforestation of the whole of southern Italy we know of deforestation events in various areas caused by the demand for Timbers for ships that were being built

On mass in various time periods obviously in Antiquity and closer to to now but the thing is that forests over time and we’re talking over hundreds of years do have the capacity to regenerate themselves and that’s even with relatively poor soil uh which is often Left Behind as the result of

Deforestation and then intensive use so looking at the UK for example when the Romans arrived in what’s now England they noted it was incredibly heavily forested over time as the population increased and demand for wood for ship building but also for fuel for home construction etc etc increased England was pretty much

Deforested until you got just before the Black Death there was actually less Forest as far as we can tell from what I’ve read There was less Forest just before the black death in England than there is now because obviously people were using wood considerably more per capita than we do these

Days and and then the Black Death came population massively declined forests grew back and then forests were cut down again as England became a naval power in the age of sail and then Forest grew back again because now you’re working with Iron and Steel Etc and then you get to the modern era

Where people are looking at oh well we should maybe conserve these things so if southern Italy had been completely stripped of trees in a maximal case to supply the ships of the Punic Wars that might have caused some problems but by about the first second century ad you’d be looking at

Everything having regrown or a good portion of it and obviously that’s a long time go comparative to now so whilst the demands for shipping for the Punic Wars may have caused significant deforestation in southern Italy the fact that the area remained deforested and the soil gradually degraded would have been more

A symptom of ongoing demand for Timber but so obviously ship building as Rome tried to maintain its fleets at various points but also how home construction General material for building things like you know peeler shafts Etc Fuel and also use of the land for agriculture as the population

Grew and that persistent maintaining of the deforestation would have then led to gradual soil degradation and various issues and obviously once soil degradation Falls past a certain point it’s much much harder for forests to recover but also so you have the problem of if the soil degrades and you’re

Trying to support a population and you’re not getting the crop yields then people start to expand and the Agricultural and pastoral areas even further in an attempt to bulk up the Food Supplies which just leads to a cyclical problem daris CZ asks what was the reason that 6in dual-purpose guns

Were not implemented during the inter War period well it wasn’t for lack of trying in fact with the county glass they even tried for 8 in Dual Purpose guns but fundamentally the problem with trying to do 6in or 8 in Dual Purpose weapons in the interval period was weight uh weight

Of the shells particularly and that’s because at the time there’s still a huge amount of manual effort involved in loading these shells especially at high angles and the human body can only lift and maneuver a certain amount of weight at certain distances from the sort of the

Core if you’ve worked in manual any kind of manual labor these days you’ll know about all sorts of fancy health and safety instructions that talk about you know you should only lift up to 10 kilos with your arms extended and up to 20 kilos with your arms close up to your

Chest um I’m not entirely sure who came up with those I understand maybe in a general case but you a generally fit adult human could lift a little bit more than that um maybe not on an ongoing basis day in day out forever in a day and still remain entirely healthy which

May be what they’re based on but nevertheless little digression there but essentially and this was the same problem they had trying to come up with secondary guns generally the bigger the G the shell obviously the more destructive it is but the heavier it is the harder is to maneuver

And therefore the slower your rate of fire and that’s just with you know surface guns uh guns designed to shoot at destroyers and so forth with the anti-aircraft development and Dual Purpose weapons High angles of elevation means you’re not just having to pick the thing up and

Pop it down on a tray you’re potentially having to pick the thing up tilt it place it and support it on a tray and Poss even be called in some guns to actually help Ram it home and of course the effort needed if you have hydraulic rammers to shove a

6-in shell sideways or near enough sideways if it’s at 5 10 20° elevation you know a lot of that weight is being supported on the tray and in the gun whereas if the gun is now elevated at 70° cuz it’s trying to shoot down an incoming aircraft you’re essentially having to deadlift almost

All of that weight on the gramar and that also is a limitation on a larger scale that this is one of the reasons why Battleship guns generally speaking can’t actually reload at all angles there are a few Battleship guns that designed to do this um but even the ones

That were designed to do that don’t either didn’t usually do it or couldn’t actually really do it fully at all elevations although they could do it at significantly higher elevations than others because of of this issue of how much weight are you actually asking the rammer to to

Shove it’s the same reason why for example some of the world’s strongest men can pull a 747 but only lift a car and so despite people trying repeatedly to invent 6in Dual Purpose weapons because they thought this would be the ideal heavy anti-shipping caliber and also provide a fairly Hefty um Flack

Burst for the shells it just didn’t work out and until you got in the latter part of the second world war and immediately thereafter you got ships like wer in the US and tiger in the UK where they eventually managed to include much stronger autoloaders well much stronger mechanical loaders

Period which then became autoloaders which then took away much of the human element as well as just being stronger mechanically and they are essentially the things that enable the 6-in Dual Purpose weapon and then we have was the there a design for a unified battery warship in the age of sale in other

Words a ship carrying all of one certain pound of gunshot and if not why there was actually and this idea cropped up repeatedly during the age of sale but one of the earliest ships that could be said to have a unified main battery was Vasa now you can perhaps see where I’m

Going with this one now Vasa had a few other issues like her hole being a little bit too narrow but as you if you’ve watched the series that we’ve done on Vasa previously you’ll know that that one of the contributory factors to Vasa going over sideways was the fact

That she was entirely armed with 24 pound of cannon on both gun decks and it turned out that for a ship of her size and with that number of guns having 24 Pounders on the upper gun deck didn’t help with her stability issues and this was fundamentally the problem that

Multi-deck ships of the line faced during the age of sale you wanted to have fairly Hefty guns to do the most damage which usually by the towards the end of the age of sale had stabilized either a 32 or 36 pounder depending if you were French Spanish British Etc but

Something in that range they had had been experiments with 42s earlier but they turned out to be a bit too heavy but if you had a three Decker ship of the line and you tried to put you know six ton 32 pound of long guns on every

Single deck you just roll over and sink even with the Fairly Extreme Tumble home that some ships of the line had and so in an effort to counter this you end up with 32 pound let’s say in a British ship of the line you have 32 Pounders then 24 Pounders and then

Depending on the time period either 12 or 18 Pounders and they’re all long guns which means that approximately speaking your broadside can reach out to a unified given distance and then obviously that means you could engage in a line battle the problem with having a unified battery at that point was that either

You would have to significantly downsize the guns you have on your lower gun decks which is going to reduce your broadside battery which is obviously not a good thing because it means your ship is now less effective against other ships including perhaps ships smaller than it

Or if you don’t want to roll over you have to use progressively shorter and shorter Barrel where weapons which therefore weigh less and would have an equivalent weight to a long gun of a smaller calber uh caliber and in theory that would allow you to have a unified shot for your

Whole battery but the Restriction would be that only your lower gun deck could reach out to full range and eventually this is actually what was done the reason you’ve had got USS Pennsylvania the US Navy’s only First Rate ship of the line up is because the US Navy was actually one of

The leading pioneers of this idea in the aftermath of the War of 1812 with its 74 Gunners and later the pennslvania as well and the idea was also then adopted into various other navies including the Royal Navy and what what this did was essentially yeah you have your 32

Pounder long gun on your lower gun deck in the case of a First Rate you then have a shorter Barrel 32 pounder on the middle gun deck so it would have slightly less charge slightly less range slightly less hitting power but it wasn’t a carade just yet and then on the

Upper gun deck you would have an even shorter Barrel 32 pounder and in some cases quite often these would actually be reboard 24 Pounders and then on the upper decks are not the main gun decks you would have 32 pounder carad and as I said this this idea meant

You had absolutely monstrous close in Firepower so if you’re fighting a battle of Trafalga style engagement as the British where you’re getting up close and personal this is a brilliant broadside to have whereas if you’re fighting a longer range engagement let’s say you’re on the Franco Spanish side of

Travala and you’re bombarding the enemy ships as they come in it’s a less optimal broadside to have because you’ll only be able to engage at long range with one gun deck and of course it does leave you somewhat vulnerable because if an enemy vessel has a mixed battery but

All long guns then in theory if they can keep the range open they can shoot at you with if we’re looking at say 120 gunship of the line they can shoot at you with about 60 guns not counting the additional ones they’ve stuck on there

And you can only reply with maybe 15 or so from your lower gun deck that’s obviously not brilliant but that depends on people keeping the range open so if everyone’s gone that way it doesn’t really matter quite so much and so you have a brief period in the 1820s

1830s where people were going for this unified 32 pound of main battery in Britain and the states and slightly different calibers in various other countries and then shell guns come in and ruin all because people start supplementing with shell guns of various calibers and it’s no longer a unified

Main battery falan asks did any navies deploy any rated ships that acted as tenders for resupply or repairs to other rated ships or was it just easier to rely on ports around the planet whilst there wasn’t a specific rate that was used as a tender or resupply vessel very often

Such a thing was actually done usually with either older ships that were no longer considered combat worthy so a lot of 50 54 64 Gunner ships towards the end of the age of s met that fate or perhaps a ship which had been captured in battle and was still floatable you know it

Wasn’t going to sink anytime soon but perhaps the cost of repairing and refitting it to bring it back into service was not seen as economical at the time either because the Navy was short of cash or because they just thought well we’ve got more than enough of this type of

Ship and so in those cases those vessels sometimes would be deployed as guard vessels but very very often would be deployed to either supplement Port facilities or to in some cases become Port facilities for a while to act as tender and resupply to other vessels so if you look at a fair number

Of 19th century paintings especially in the middle of the 19th century kind of 1840 through to 1870 you’ll notice small ships of the line and frigs very often in a dismas condition being used as tenders and resupply points for all sorts of things there’s a rather famous uh painting or

Engraving of the SS great easn with uh an old single gun deck frig next to it as a tender and the thing is absolutely dwarfed by the Leviathan that is the great Easton ironically enough given the original name of that ship um so yes they they were used and

Obviously if you have a very what you might call an auster Port so if you are planning to conduct a campaign in a region and you’re like well this Harbor is an absolutely brilliant Harbor make an excellent Bas of operations you know it’s just you know a few hours sailing

Away from where we want to be fighting but there’s no real civilization there then one of the things you can do is sail a bunch of old ships there as well and have them M up as tenders and resupply points the other advantage that this has is that a lot of

The time this kind of f to aside age of Sal ships didn’t really come at least the big ones come right up to the dock side very often they would more often anchor out in the harbor and supplies would have and men would have to be fed to and from them in small

Boats partly because of the difficulties of maneuvering such a ship alongside and as well as you know maintaining depth off of a dock side Etc whereas if you have a resupply tender that’s M out in deeper water you can get a lot closer to that to get take supplies Etc on board

And then we have it seems that throughout history the biggest obstacle to the size and capabilities of a Navy’s vessels especially its capital ships is Dry Dock and Canal sizes so logically the simplest solution is to expand these pieces of infrastructure first yet it always seems that throughout the time

Period in history the channel covers Every Nation would rather do anything else why what makes the expansion of dry docks and canals such a painful pill to swallow and what does it take for the various nations of the time period to CH the channel covers to actually get on

And do it partly it’s just Cost you know if you’re going to build a ship that involves quite a lot of cost already but if your building of a ship involves also having to extend your infrastructure those additional costs tend to make people in the treasury cry into their

Cornflakes but it’s also a matter of scale uh because it’s not just a case of okay well we will expand this bit of infrastructure the problem is if you’re you’re going to set a new standard for the size of a capital ship and you need to expand your infrastructure to build

That well if you want to build more than one ship at a time that means you have to expand more than one slipway at a time and if you’re going to do that then you ideally want quite a few different slipways expanded if for no other reason

Than you know if if you’ve established this new standard and let’s say you decide we’re going to build four ships simultaneously you expand four slipways well now the owners of those four slip now have a strangle hold on capital ship contracts which may not work out for you really well in the long

Term then you’ve also got to expand the dry docks to take the ships when they need maintenance and for a Navy that’s mostly based at home that may not be too much of a problem but you’re probably going to need to expand four five six seven dry docks

Realistically if you are a Navy with significant overseas commitments like the British Empire then it gets a lot more more scary because you need to have at least if you’re going to build like say with the g3s and n3s so let’s say You’re Building eight ships you’re going

To need at least two to four dry docks at home at any so that you can handle two to four holes at any one time because it’s not just peace time maintenance you have to worry about it’s also about what if they get damaged in Wartime and you’ve got to repeat a that

Process on a smaller scale at your various other outposts jalter Malta Singapore Etc you’re going to need at least one Dry Dock in each of those areas expanded and suddenly you’re looking at expanding a dozen plus dry docks and six to eight slipways that’s a lot of money to build

One or two classes of ship and you also then run into the problem of okay we’re doing that for this set of capital ships but what about the next set are they going to be larger are we going to have to go through this whole rig roll again

And if so then you do what I’ve usually advocated for is actually just do a very very considerable extension because that future proofs you against having to do it in the again in the future for while but then obviously you’re that’s a lot of upfront cost because extending your

Slipway by let’s say 50 ft and expanding all your dry docks by 50 ft that’s going to cost a certain amount if you say actually we’re going to expand everything by 200 ft because 15 years down the line we might be building ships that are that much longer than our current

Ones that’s a huge amount of additional upfront cost and again trying to persuade most politically guided offices like treasuries of various governments that long-term planning might be a thing well unfortunately long-term planning past the next election cycle is almost anathema to politicians and unfortunately these days in a lot of the

Private infrastructure world as well although for them they’re mostly thinking in terms of their next Golden parachute or that Financial Year’s stock report because and again this is a something of a flaw with people being very selfish in short term if you are let’s say the CEO of the Clyde Bank

Shipyards which you can see here if you turn around and say well sorry everyone you’re not getting all you investors you’re not getting any dividends this year because we invested colossal amounts of money in massively expanding our ship building facilities but you will get considerably better returns for the next two or three

Decades because we’ll be pretty much the premier ship building facility in the UK whilst you know if you look at the the cold hard sums that’s actually a massive net win for the shareholders unfortunately an awful lot of shareholders will stamp their feet and scream and one but I want my money now

Now alganon needs to go to private school this year and I spent last year’s massive dividends on opium so you’re doing a bad job and if they’re in positions of power on the board they’ll stop you from making that expansion which yeah people suck generally um but then you also have even

Larger infrastructure issues which is you may not be able to easily or at all expand and the infrastructure so what you can’t quite see in this particular photo of hood under construction is that there’s a tributary River off to the other side and that is what allows Hood

To be launched safely you couldn’t necessarily expand all of these slipways to build a ship the size of hood and actually launch it safely so you you may then have to look at either relocating your shipyards which are massively expensive or you may have to look at digging out massive tranches of the

Opposite river bank if you’re a shipyard on a river and the other thing is literally at the other end as you can see with hood here which where she’s overlapped the supply Road the supply Railway train and kind of inserted her bow in between the buildings is that shipyards tend to

Build up infrastructure around them and if you’re trying to expand in land there’s may be an awful lot of infrastructure that you need to relocate there so buildings walkways Railways etc etc and you may not own enough land going further Inland to actually relocate all those things within that section of the shipyard

So there are a lot of obstacles to overcome when it comes to massively expanding uh dockyard infrastructure but on the other hand this is part and parts of what comes with being a big Naval power and at the end end of the day you as a government that is looking at these

Things you have to face a choice if you wish to remain competitive and have yourself taken seriously on the global stage you have to bite the bullet and invest and if you’re going to bite the bullet and invest in all this infrastructure then the best approach is

To bite the bullet in a really big way and invest in massively expanded infrastructure so you don’t have to repeat the exercise every two or three years but that would require long-term thinking which is why people dig their heels in and it usually doesn’t happen you get all sorts of weird and wonderful

Solutions like in this case building a battle cruiser whose bows are obscuring the windows of somebody’s office or in the French case building a battleship which you have to attach the bound Stern to after you’ve launched it etc etc etc The Forbidden left hand of Bey formerly known as yakusa girls Marine

High school training vessel haraz asks my local bus company has introduced new buses that audibly announce each stop as it comes along one of the stops in the town of Beverly Yorkshire has the name Admiral Walker Road and having never heard of him before I Googled him and

Could only discover that he died in 1925 and that he ended up as a rear Admiral in the Royal Navy is there any chance you can tell me more about this gentleman and his career as a visit to the local History Center surprisingly provided nothing apart from a picture of

His memorial now this one did take a bit of digging U because for a while I thought the only thing I was going to be able to tell you was that in the will and probate section of the national iives it describes him as leaving

£32,000 in his will which in 1925 was a lot of money um however I’m happy to report that I did manage to track down a little bit more information about him specifically I managed to track down the obituary that was published about him when he died so for lack of anything

Better I shall just read out his long form ofit because it presents a fairly good summary in the time we have a dry for a dry answer of his career so it says born on February the 6th 1836 in the reign of King William IV Admiral

Walker was the third son of Sir James Walker who was created a baronet in 1868 the Admiral lived to see the baronetti pass to three generations for he was a brother of Sir Jr Walker second baronet Uncle of Sir JH Walker third baronet and great uncle of Sir RJM Walker the fourth

And present baronet obviously that in 1925 he entered the Navy on January the 4th 1850 on board the faton a 50 Gun Ship Captain George Elliot commanding and served as a midshipman in the Black Sea during the war with Russia being awarded the Crimean and Turkish me

Medals and clasp for sevastopol so he was in the Crimean War off this port on September 15th 1855 he performed a gallant feat of life saving for which he was awarded the silver medal of the royal Humane Society he jumped overboard in a heavy seene and rescued an able

Seaman named Cullis with whom he then swam to a launch he became a sub liutenant in January 1856 and a leftenant in February 1858 on June 17th 1862 he was appointed to the screw frigate Urus Flagship of in China of vice admiral s sir Augustus Cooper for disposal and while in her saw

Considerable service against Pirates in China for this he was promoted to Commander in November 1864 War at the early age of 28 after further duty of an uninvent character he was Advanced to captain in December 1871 and two years later he retired being promoted to rear Admiral on the retired list in on

January 1st 1888 R adal Walker was married in 1873 the year of his retirement from the Navy to Edith Francis daughter of Admiral The Honorable Arthur Dunham of kilnwick Percy Yorkshire she died in 190 six having had two sons of whom one Mr Edgar W Walker became a barrister and as a

Captain of Third Battalion East Yorkshire regiment was killed in action in October 1914 the other the Reverend Philip seawalker is reced of lockington the Admiral was a justice of the peace for the East Riding of Yorkshire which means he was technically Justice of the Peace around the time my great-grandfather was in that

Area weirdly enough a correspondent writes Admiral Walker was a man of very generous disposition and in addition to his numerous private benef benefactions he was very munificent in his public and charitable gifts which included reading rooms a public Fountain and a miniature rifle range is that the rifle range is

Very small or it uses very small rifles um which was at one time the largest in the country having a shooting distance of 100 yards so probably using small rifles I’m going to guess and was used for annual competitions of the national miniature Rifle Association since the

War it has been adapted for use as a school Clinic he took no part in the municipal life of the Town of Beverly but he was a trustee of a number of charitable bodies and was also Justice of the Beast for these riding as we’ve already

Mentioned etc etc it goes on a little bit about personal friendships and his politics but I think that is probably I have good a summary as any Sebastian asks would the Italian Akila and spiero carriers decisively change things in the Mediterranean Thea if they’d somehow been completed for the start of the war

Even in 1941 changed things yes decisively probably not and I say that because whilst if we sort of handwave somehow that they get completed um in time for Italy to when Italy joins the war or whatever that’s not going to change the fact that the more capable aircraft that they were eventually

Planning on using just aren’t available at that time period so you have to crash course some current Italian fighter aircraft or bomber something like that to be the air group for the first couple of years so you know if you’re lucky something like a G50 which the F G50 is it’s an okayish

Fighter It suffers from the fact it really is not very heavily armed at all honestly performance spec wise fulma probably wouldn’t have too many problems dealing with it and yeah so given the fact that in the central Mediterranean at least the Royal Navy was already coming under concerted attack from the reia

Aeronautica adding a handful of additional lighter weight strike aircraft and Fighters probably isn’t going to change a huge amount there where it could make a difference and it’s obviously it’s not going to make a difference in the round in the the whole campaign Italy is still the Italian Navy

Is still going to um lose so yeah if you’re looking for decisive change I’m afraid you need to look on a little bit of a grander scale but detailed engagements when especially when the Italian Fleet Ventures out beyond the initial coverage of the reg aeronautica those might change I mean

You might have you know the Royal Navy devoting more more carriers or rushing the development of better fighters in any case so you see hurricanes for the for the start and then martlets and so forth but for example in the campaign that leads up to the battle of

Matapan the swordfish that is dispatched after the Italian force that obviously damages Victoria Veno and crippled Pola those are swordfish and blenham coming from Shore which only have to contest with Italian anti-aircraft fire now if either Akila or spiera was there and was able to put up any kind of fighter defense

That forces the Royal Navy to send in sweeps of full Mars or whatever other Fighters they have available first to try and Tangle up an Italian combat Air Patrol and suppress it and then the swordfish go in otherwise they risk the swordfish being engaged by the Italian Fighters which might happen anyway and

That might disrupt the attack which then may or may not prevent polar from being crippled which then may or may not lead to the Battle of Cape Matan actually happening at night the way that it historically did so I think Aila and spier have the capability to change individual

Engagements although of course the flip side is they will be priority targets for the Royal Navy as well voier asks a paraphrased question from my little cousin how accurate are the depictions of the submarine sea mines and torpedo in Finding Nemo well the mines are your sort of generic spiky sea mines

Um they got a few too many and a few too large Herz horns for most uh mines of the time there are one or two Herz horn spherical mines that would look somewhat like this but again the the the spikes the Herz horns are a little bit overdone

But otherwise you can see the chain and the sea anchor and everything they’re actually not half bad and the fact they’ve got the submarine sunk in the middle of the Minefield presumably by the Minefield isn’t you know too bad a shout either orbe it you know if it was me being really

Really nit piggy I’d say the Minefield is uh set far too deep there should be a good chunk of the mines much closer to the surface on longer chains um oh and also of course they’re far far far too close together but that that’s again artistic license the torpedo you know

It’s a torpedo it’s a cylinder it’s got some rather nice counter rotating propellers at the back um possibly a a little bit too modern of a propeller setup for the kind of period of Submarine that’s being depicted but as a generic torpedo it’s not half bad and then the submarine

Itself is fairly easily identifiable as a World War II American submarine probably a gate or a balao there are a few artistic details which are slightly wrong like the fact later on when you see the bow torpedo tubes there are only four tubes um in instead of the six that you would find

On a Gator or a balow but obviously all the wording is in English the lettering on the side is in English so it’s definitely either a British or an American submarine um and it has a completely unrecognizable number because the when you see the number it’s something faded

C-22 possibly there’s a rust patch afterwards maybe that’s 220 something but uh although there are some 220 series Gatos that didn’t make it back the the us obviously doesn’t prefix their submarines with something C presumably SC or something like that so yeah minor little details like that but broadly speaking it’s fairly

Recognizable fairly quickly as a World War II period American submarine which is rather interesting in and of itself because again it continu the trend of although in this case the accuracy is a little bit off as we just mentioned it does continue the trend of movies which are not reporting to be

Historical movies actually including stuff that is far more historically accurate than movies that sometimes claim to be historical movies and get things horrifically wrong I asks would it be possible to call the Battle of Cape enano a Japanese Victory given that the northern Force did complete their objective I wouldn’t necessarily call it

A Japanese Victory I mean they did get a bunch of their ships sunk and well a decoy force is supposed to be a decoy force that doesn’t necessarily presuppose getting a bunch of your ships sent to the bottom plus you’ve also got to remember that ironically enough of

The three forces that the Japanese sent out for the Battle of lat golf a our’s force the northern Force the decoy one that was the one the Americans were supposed to see coming and focus on it and therefore will miss the other two and as it turned out the

Americans spotted the southern and Center forces long before they spotted the northern Force which then led to the Battle of cayan c and the loss of mhi before anything could actually be done and well the US Subs you know plugging away taking out aargo Etc as well didn’t

Help matters but once you get to okay now as our’s forces have actually been spotted and the US is coming north the point of the sacrifice of the northern force was supposed to be to allow the Southern and Center forces to do their job and as we know the southern force

Was completely destroyed and karita kind of yeah Taffy 3 dealt with kurita so you know as a as a decoy to enable something else to happen well that other thing didn’t happen maybe that’s not necessarily entirely as our’s fault but the other factor is that yes they were

Very short on aircraft they only had just over 100 aircraft between all the carriers but again you could have done better I think than expend most of them uselessly attacking the American Fleet which you knew was probably hiding to nothing in the first place if it was up

To me and I was you know in as hour’s position then even if we chalk up cbnc and all the other stuff and not being spotted themselves to just circumstance rather than loading up pressure strike aircraft onto the carriers I would have load loaded up maybe a dozen strike aircraft using you

Know the judies you know those really really irritating strike aircraft that seem able to bypass American defenses in ones and twos usually by traveling at low level or other Shenanigans and okay you send those out because ultimately either you get some really weird you know Franklin Bunker Hill style attacks

In which cause massively disproportionate down damage or it fails but you’ve only lost a dozen aircraft so that’s I mean it’s not necessarily a win-win but it’s certainly not a massive loss either way and then the other roughly 100 or so aircraft just have Fighters because you know the Americans

Are coming for you that’s the whole point of the decoy Force you equally know or should know that the strike element that you have aboard historically isn’t really going to accomplish all that much but even with the fact the Americans have more and in many cases better aircraft if you can

Put up a hundred fighters to defend yourself you can probably inflict some reasonable casualties on the American dive and torpedo bombers that are coming after you and chew them up now that’s not necessarily quite as nice as you know taking out a carrier or two but you’re unlikely to do that anyway short

Of as I said the aforementioned sneaky judies so that’s what I would have done and as a result I I would hesitate to call it a Japanese Victory um in terms of yes well done you managed to decoy Holly maybe you could call it Mission failed successfully Rebel srl asks after

Viewing your video on Naval Logistics again I think there’s one more area to consider Personnel would you agree that the need to continuously recruit train and assign officers and ratings who can perform their duties to an acceptable degree of Competency is an often underappreciated role in the ability of

A Navy to be effective and even dominant at times times absolutely crew are probably the single most important asset for a Navy alongside you know actually having the ships in the first place because if you have enough men and officers and men and you’ve got them all

Trained up to a decent standard and they will work together pretty well that is easily worth you know half a generation of technological advantage or a few extra ships here and there because well the biggest longest casing point I think would be the Napoleonic Wars because when you look at the ships being

Produced by both sides quite often French and Spanish ships were bigger in many cases were much more heavily armed than British ships now that’s not necessarily to say that British ships were entirely inferior as I’ve mentioned before British ships tended to be more maneuvering able and British ships also

Tended to have a lot more staying power out at Sea before they’d start working themselves loose and had to go back into Port so you know there are qualitative advantages on both sides there but ultimately if a British fleet has been sitting off your Coastline for 6 months

And you’ve been in Port you resting your ships and then you come out in that kind of straight up line battle theoretically ship for ship at similar rates a Franco Spanish Fleet should normally throw a bit more metal per broadside and sail a little bit faster which is a technological

Advantage in the you know the fixed case of a battle but the fact that the British Fleet generally was full of Veteran Sailors who knew what they were doing and the Franco Spanish Fleet usually wasn’t meant that what could otherwise have been a slight qualitative Edge for the for the Franco Spanish

Fleets turned into an environment where the Royal Navy was winning 90 plus% of the engagements and the need to continuously maintain the numbers of men is also very important because otherwise you can end up in a very destructive cycle which you know is not unique to navies it’s

Happened in places that I’ve worked I’ve seen it happen in other companies and other organizations that have worked with companies or organizations that I’ve worked with with and I’m sure many of you guys have experienced the same thing where you can have the best Workforce but if High command whoever

That happens to be whether that be an admiralty management CEO board of directors Etc if they cut the numbers of available people either directly or through lack of recruitment down to below a level at which there’s enough people to do all the jobs then various people will start having to do multiple

Jobs they’ll burn out they’ll leave and then whoever’s left has to take on the job that that original person was supposed to be doing plus the job that they’d adopted so then now someone else is doing three persons jobs and eventually they’ll burn out and leave

And then the next person down the line has to do four person’s jobs and very very quickly obviously it becomes unsustainable and you get a death spiral of competent people going why should I do three people’s jobs here for minimal pay and poor conditions when I can go to

A another other organization who will pay me more uh with with the skills and experience I’ve picked up here and will only make me do one job you know that’s that’s a a fairly big issue and part of the ability to recruit train and then utilize officers and men in a Navy is

You know offering them a decent amount of pay uh decent accommodations and where perhaps you can’t necessarily stretch to particularly generous pay or particularly generous accommodation you can at least stretch to offering them some other kind of incentive and when navies fail to do that usually although not always because of political

Interference you end up with aention death Spirals and that could be extremely bad if it’s not caught very quickly and finally Sam zarelli asks how long in advance before firing could you load an age of sale Cannon without degradation of the powder charge since it would no longer be in its protective

Storage unit and may be subject to moisture in the end unfortunately this is one of those questions which is kind of like how long is a piece of string because it vastly depends on the conditions that you are facing so if you’re in a relatively stable climate zone that’s sort of warm

Is dry maybe you’re blockading the coast of Spain or something like that and the weather is fine then you could potentially have your powder bag loaded and and put your your ball and everything on top of that and it might be good for days conversely if you have also primed it so

You’ve poked a hole in the bag and it’s cold and miserable and wet and damp and maybe the gun is on the lowest gun deck and for whatever reason maybe either the gun ports a little bit leaky or you have to keep the gunport open uh because

You’re in battle and the waves aren’t quite high enough to justify closing it but you are getting a lot of Splash and spray coming in and obviously some of that might be going down the barrel soaking through the wadding etc etc well at that point then your powder charge might

Become pretty much inoperable or very low order in a matter of hours possibly even sooner if you’re really unlucky with the waves and as inferred from that you know even if you’re in rough weather if let’s say you’re on a First Rate ship of the line preloading a gun on your upper

Enclosed gun deck is probably going to have its charge last a lot longer than a gun on the lowest gun deck or a gun on the in the upper open exposed areas whereas in a very hot possibly humid environment but one where there’s perhaps a little bit of a breeze then

Maybe being on a quarter deck gun or a poop deck gun might actually be the best alternative because it’ll be warm the breeze will hopefully keep the moisture levels down a little bit compared to being inside the ship proper so hopefully from that you can glean it’s a very moving

Target and that’s it for this week everybody thank you very much for listening and I hope to see you again in another video because it’s time for me to scadaddle