The Drydock - Episode 401

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:18]Hello everybody and welcome to the dry rock episode 401.

[00:00:22]As this month is a catch-up month, the questions this week are taken from guides 467 and 468 on the Edsil and Rodero class destroyer escorts. The Wednesday videos on hand reloading a battleship, i.e., you know, the battleship movie and are some of those things plausible, as well as the video on German guided missiles and bombs, the HS293 and the Fritz X and the Friday DRA book reviews episode 001 video. And we open proceedings with Elmarante Brown who asks, "I was reading an old warship international edition about it Italy's commandante medagal of uh Medagi Dioro class possibly uh destroyers and I found a reference to a proposed quadruple 37mm anti-aircraft mount. Do you know anything more about that weapon? And what if any improvements would the quad mount have incorporated compared to the manually trained and elevated twin 37 mm mount the Italians were using since the mid 1930s?

[00:01:23]Also, why didn't the Italians put a proper recoil mechanism on the original dual 37mm weapon to reduce vibration and the need for an extremely heavy mount?

[00:01:32]So, the developmental history of the Italian 37 mm anti-aircraft guns is actually quite interesting. In the early part of the 1930s, the Italians were looking at their what I term medium anti-aircraft guns and in this case that'll be 37 mil being mounted in essentially small turrets. So armored enclosed gunhouses as opposed to the more open mounts that we're more familiar with with perhaps both 40 mil and similar.

[00:02:01]And in this format, they used the system that had a lot of issues with vibration because only the breach recoil, the rest of the gun was fixed. And partly as a result of that, and partly as a result of just the sheer weight of having a quadruple 37 mm mount, plus all obviously the necessary heavy mountings to absorb the recoil and vibration, plus the armor plating, the whole thing was deemed far too heavy and far too unwieldy. And so it was ditched. And from that you get this twin 37 mm mount for example. And at one point they were even looking at sex tupal mountings but they had pretty much the same problems as the quads. Now, as far as I can tell, and Italian naval historians, hi Italian military archives if you're watching this, or if someone can summon him, may be able to offer a bit more insight, but from what I can tell, it seems to be that this system where the most of the gun is fixed and thus most of the recoil is transmitted to the mounting was put in in an effort for simplicity and ease of maintenance. Because yes, you can have a full recoil system, which as it turns out is the better option. But if you have a full recoil system that absorbs the full recoil of the entire barrel, that adds a whole lot of additional mechanical complexity. And if you're planning to have quite a few of these installations, that's potentially a huge amount of maintenance. Whereas just accepting that the thing will weigh a little bit more in theory would make for a simpler and easier to maintain mount. However, as I mentioned earlier, they discovered that yeah, these vibration issues were not really fantastic. And so they developed a single 37 mm mount later on in the 1930s that did have a full proper recoil system. And that was actually much more favored by the Italian anti-aircraft gunners than the twin mount because although you only had a single gun as opposed to two, you were far more likely to actually hit something with it and not have the teeth rattled out of your skull while you're doing it. And as you might be able to tell when if you look at the magazine feed here, much like the bofers 40 mil, this could be continuously reloaded. The Bofers used a four round clip. The Italian 37 mil used a six round clip, but you could just keep chucking ammunition in there to maintain its rate of fire. So, it was a a pretty decent weapon once it had a proper recoil system installed. And when it came to designing, I'm going to call them the Doro class. Um, the Italians theoretically actually wanted to move to a much heavier anti-aircraft weapon as their intermediate gun. So, they were going to have a 65 mil gun. However, they were having problems developing it at a rate of fire that was commensurate with what they actually, you know, wanted given that you'd have fewer amounts. So you needed to chuck a fair number of shells down range.

[00:04:54]And they realized, well, hang on a minute. With the full recoil system on the single 37 mil, we now have something that doesn't vibrate as much, which is good. So it can be bolted into lighter decks and so forth. And it just physically weighs less cuz well, it turns out the recoil system weighs considerably less than the extra heavy mountings that they were having to install on the twin systems. and therefore it was now a system that was actually viable to be installed on destroyers.

[00:05:24]But the one thing that destroyers lack overall is deck space. And as I've mentioned in a few other videos in terms of deck space efficiency, a quad system at medium anti-aircraft gun calibers is far more efficient than twins or singles, which take up almost as much deck space and offer far less firepower.

[00:05:43]And so they revisited the idea of a quadruple mounting but now with proper recoil systems and without any of the armored gunhouse shenanigans. So essentially in some ways you could think of it as a Italian equivalent to the quad 40mm bofers. And that was the system that they had planned for the Doros.

[00:06:05]But it doesn't seem that that system got all the way to production because well it like the doors themselves they were it was under development and consideration when the armistice showed up. Under oceans over mountains asks when do you think the UK psychologically lost the balance of dominant naval credibility- perception? 1899 with the SpanishAmerican War, uh, Japan's knocking down of Russia in 1905, Jutland in 1916, attempts to control the 1930s treaties, etc. or some other point. If I'm understanding the question correctly, I think it comes in really three phases and I would classify that as politically, militarily, and nationally. And of course there are gradual downramps to each of these uh areas. But you know this is my perception. Feel free to chime in yourselves if you think there's a different timeline. So I think up until the postworld war I period the UK or the British Empire as a whole psychologically was absolutely prepared to be the dominant naval power and in reality was the first stage of losing that came politically with the Washington Naval Treaty of the 1920s because up until that point the Royal Navy had always responded to potential foreign navies getting close to it in size with just going, "This is unacceptable. We will build ourselves bigger and occasionally form an alliance if it serves our needs." But although the Navy was prepared to escalate in terms of ship design and ship numbers and replace its a good chunk of its fleet after the First World War, the political establishment in postw World War I Britain wasn't prepared to do that. they were under among other things. I mean there's a lot of political shamings going on and I'm not a political historian but one of the things was this determination that World War I had been the great war and there therefore theoretically wouldn't be another big one which well turned out to be a bit of a naive thinking but there you go. So while if you could say nationally the British still or the British people still thought of the navy as the dominant force on the seas and militarily the Royal Navy was prepared to actually give that in fact the politicians weren't willing to pay for it which they had always been previously. Of course there had always been arguments about how much funding the Navy should have but it had never really been a question that the Royal Navy should be the biggest navy in the world. It was just a question of how much bigger than everybody else's navies should it be. But with the Washington Naval Treaty, the British political establishment accepted on paper par with the United States and gave up any notions of superiority because it also obviously allowed the Anglo-Japanese naval treaty to expire. So, it didn't even have allies to top up the numbers as it were. And as I was was reminded by um another historian who actually emailed me a few weeks ago when it comes to discussing things like could Britain's afford the G3s and the N3s, an awful lot of this period is massively dominated by internal political issues up to and including who actually is being paid while Britain is paying down its national debt. So from from a purely rational standpoint, Britain could fund a naval arms race. It had the money and it had the infrastructure. It had the industry and it had the n to a certain degree the national desire. Um although that was a little bit wavering after the first world war, but it didn't have the political will. Then I think you take a step down to militarily.

[00:09:56]And militarily, I think you're probably looking at the end of the Second World War because going into the Second World War, the Royal Navy was still one of the largest navies on the planet. And when you look at the late 1930s rearmament scheme, the Navy militarily was quite prepared to turn around and say, "Okay, yes, we're expanding in the Navy. this is our route to expansion and these are our limitations and these are how we're going to try and address the limitations as quickly as possible and this is how we're going to build our way up but at the end of the second world war with a lot of the infrastructure having been bombed or otherwise damaged Britain as a whole economically exhausted and the Americans having just gone lol 3D ship printer go burr militarily at that point the Royal Navy was looking at various fairly advanced designs and kind of beginning to align more with the political side of things.

[00:10:53]Obviously, the Treasury was trying to extract every last penny from the Navy as well. But I think when you look at the late 1940s with the cancellation of things like the minotaur cruiser project and the multiclass carriers and so forth and the absolute pigs ear that was made of the British carrier program in the postwar environment, there just seems to have been a general acknowledgement in the upper echelons of the Royal Navy that Britain was not going to come even close to competing to even a peace time American fleet on the world stage and we shouldn't even try uh and instead realize ed to a smaller fleet and obviously as you go on into the 1950s the dissolution of empire. And then I think where the national perception catches up with what at this point is both a political and a military reality would be the sewers crisis which is as much a product of absolutely stupid political bungling as anything else because you have the political establishment trying to make a navy which it has chronically underfunded do something against the expressed desires of a much larger navy and political establishment that being the US in the belief that somehow the dominance that the Britain enjoyed before the first world war and to a certain extent in the inter war period somehow psychologically carried over into the 1950s when that you know was blatantly untrue to anyone with an ounce of common sense but hey we are talking about politicians here and that whole debacle pretty much ended did any idea of Britain being a absolute top tier player be you know able to do what it wanted not entirely irrespective but near enough irrespective of what anybody else thought and as I say a classic example in my opinion of the mid to late 20th and early 21st century British political establishment trying to cosplay as the Royal Navy circa the actual British Empire period while not actually paying for such a navy and then being surprised when it turns out we don't actually have the navy to fulfill their stupid dreams.

[00:13:11]Vicky asks a series of questions. So, as is traditional when I come across one of these question blocks from Vicki, I'm just going to mention each question briefly as I go and answer them kind of quickfire style. Question one, uh, after the capture of the Maranas, why did Admirals Nimits and King both want to go for an invasion of the South China Sea area? Initially Formosa and Taiwan later changed to the Philippines because of MacArthur rather than sailing about the same distance north instead of west and going after Japan directly.

[00:13:40]Broadly speaking, the the general narrative that seems to come out of US high command even in mid to late 44 uh certainly the various officers who are discussing it is essentially look at the casualties we've taken in the first few operations places like Tarowa and Saipan and then look at the numbers of troops that they know that the Japanese have on their home islands and then do some quick simple mathematics and work out what the expected casualty counts are going to be.

[00:14:14]And very very quickly, everybody just kind of goes, "Yeah, let's not do that.

[00:14:19]You know, let's not stick our faces into a wood chipper voluntarily. How about we go for the starvation idea instead?" And essentially that amounted to cutting the supply lines between the Dutch East Indies and that area where the Japanese were getting fuel and rubber and so forth. and then more generally cutting the supply lines for food and other materials because they understood very well that Japan could not survive without imports. And they were pretty sure that if they essentially occupied a belt of islands which would allow them to cut off those supplies, then Japan would essentially just wither on the vine. and whether they just let it starve out completely until they gave up or they all died or whether they invaded later once the Japanese had been severely weakened.

[00:15:08]Either one of those was militarily a far easier and more palatable objective than let's throw several million Marines and army troops at what is clearly a rather fanatical set of defenders.

[00:15:21]And related to that, Vicki asks, "Why didn't the US launch B-29 attacks on the Japanese Navy's East Indies anchorages since all of these were in B29 range of major Allied air bases?" Well, simply put, despite the fact that the B29 was obviously a significant technological upgrade over the B7 and the B-24, it was still a World War II strategic bomber. And as we kind of saw with the British Pacific Fleet section uh of the series that I did recently when we briefly touched on carrier strikes as well as B29 raids. While B29s were relatively good at just leveling entire Japanese cities with a combination of high explosives and incenduries, part of the way that they did that with a reasonable survival rate was to fly really, really high. And by 1945, even the most ardent supporter of the Nordon bomb site had to admit that it really didn't live up to all the hype. And so the B29 strategic bomber fleet was basically good at erasing something the size of a city and not that good at erasing anything much smaller than that. As again we saw in that series, even B29 targeted strikes on things as large as entire factory complexes, which also don't tend to move or shoot back for the most part, were fairly ineffective.

[00:16:49]It just fell to well level everything in the area and you'll get the factory as well. And so sending extremely high altitude level bombing attacks against various Japanese Navy anchorages would expend a huge amount of fuel and a huge amount of ammunition and accomplish relatively little. And therefore it was held well just better to send them after cities which we know they can destroy and various Japanese naval assets. By the end of the war, if they choose to come out, they will be so outnumbered, they'll be fairly easily sunk and or we can go hunting them with carrier aircraft, which are a bit more likely to actually hit the broad side of a barn.

[00:17:30]Uh, third slight diversion from the Pacific. Why do those people who question Rodney's exceeding her nominal top speed when chasing Bismar never question Samuel B. Roberts exceeding her nominal top speed when chasing Center Force? Um, good question. Sometimes it's just the classic attitude you see in some corners of the internet of oh haha the British couldn't do anything they were rubbish in America rah rah eagle screech here etc etc. Um, some of it is a bit more nuanced and uh looks at things like how old Rodney was and you know the fact that she was on her way to have her machinery plant swapped out as well as the fact that you know by the time she actually got to fighting Bismar she was in a pretty ropey state machinery wise. So there are I think there are two angles that people come at. The the first angle of course you can just kind of go yeah cool ignore because those people have nothing real of substance to say.

[00:18:31]The latter example though does take some engaging with because you know they are actually making somewhat salient points and in in that those cases I think the general argument would at a very basic level be well Samuel B. Roberts was a pretty new ship, so her exceeding her top speed uh on a hole that was already known for being pretty quick isn't really that implausible. Whereas an slightly old battered ship in desperate need of an engine overhaul, it's a bit more of an ask. And I actually saw a article, paragraph, posting, whatever you call it, on Navy General Board over on Facebook recently which heavily questioned whether or not Rodney exceeded her top speed. And while I generally respect Navy General Board uh and you know their various team of contributors because they they usually get a good deal of good information out there in that particular case I do have to rather strongly disagree with them and I think they missed several rather key engineering points up to and including stuff like yeah yeah there's the formula to work out the horsepower needed for a given design speed and so forth. However, they then go and list Rodney's design speed and design horsepower and say, "Well, based on this, the power needed to reach 25 knots or something close to it would have been absolutely ridiculous."

[00:19:59]But miss within that their same posting, the point that Rodney actually significantly exceeded her design speed with a relatively minimal increase in power output. So, if you plug the numbers in using her design speed and design power output, that being 23 knots at 45,000 shaft horsepower, and then look for how much uh horsepower would she need for 25 knots, then you get the answer of about 57,800 horsepower. Now, bearing in mind that steam plants on warships at the time generally had a rated output of about 80% of their true potential output before things got really hairy safety-wise.

[00:20:38]You, interestingly enough, do actually get a power output of 56,250 horsepower if you assume that a 45,000 horsepower power plant could be run at 100% capacity and it was normally rated at 80%, which I say is a fairly common practice at the time, but one, you're still about 1500 horsepower short of 25 knots. And two, admittedly, expecting Rodney to be able to put out absolute maximum power on a very clapped engine plant is pretty optimistic.

[00:21:13]However, if you just plug in her trial results, which was 23.8 knots at 45,614 shaft horsepower into the same equation, then suddenly the power that you need to reach 25 knots, which is now only 1.2 knots further away, drops to just under 53,000 shaft horsepower. So, a drop of almost 5,000 shaft horsepower. And simultaneously, the 80 to 100% uh ratio, which is is a common ratio at the time, not necessarily exactly the one the Royal Navy used, but nonetheless, now pops up to just over 57,000 shaft horsepower, which means actually there's about uh just over a 4,000 shaft horsepower clearance um for the for Rodney's power plant above and beyond what it actually needs to hit 25 knots in theory. Now, of course, as we said, Rodney's power plant was somewhat degraded, and the the post goes on to point out that in various speed trials that she'd done during the war, her maximum sustained output was about 20 knots. However, again, that is what they're running safely. You know, when they do these these trials, especially in wartime, they're not going to run the power plant to within an inch of its life. They're going to go right this is what we think is our maximum safe sustainable power output and therefore safe sustainable speed as opposed to the accounts we get from Rodney's engine room where it is very clear that they are eking every last horsepower out of their systems and suffering for it immediately afterwards because of well the the somewhat clapped out nature of poor old Rodney once she meets up with King George V. Now, of course, does she hit exactly 25 knots? Well, that's going to be a little bit harder to prove, but it's not outside of the realm of possibility given that, you know, you've you would theoretically only have to hit about 5,000 shaft horsepower less than the original theoretical maximum rated output of the plant. And if you adjusted it to 24 1/2 knots, let's say, which would still be a very impressive feat and is only 6 of a knot above her trial speed, then at that point you quotequote only, need about 49 12,000 shaft horsepower, which you're only asking her to make at absolute all the stops pulled out about 4,000 shaft horsepower more than her original rated power output.

[00:23:47]uh which would mean that her safe rated power output i.e. the the if again assuming we were using the 80% rule um just for sake of argument would be about 39 12,000 shaft horsepower which would imply a loss of about 13 to 15% of her total power output which for a ship that's was had its machinery on its last legs and was in desperately needed for refit is entirely plausible. So yeah, the Rodney getting up to that kind of speed is certainly I think within the realms of an engineering possibility uh and shouldn't be dismissed quite so easily. And then final question um when making improvised boughs from the for the US cruisers that had been rather forcehortened at Tacaranga, why did their damage control crews just stack whole coconut logs on top of each other instead of soaring the trees into lumber that could then be fitted and nailed together to provide a much more watertight barrier? There are a few different factors in play here.

[00:24:45]Firstly, you can see from the photos they had done some treatment of the logs to get them to, you know, line up. They they certainly been planed down a little bit as well as obviously trimmed at the ends. Um, but also you've got to remember this is very much quick improvisation. Um, so if you then split these various logs down into saun timber, um, firstly it's going to be green, so it's going to warp horribly as it is, you know, out at sea in the hot sunshine. Um, and that is going to cause huge problems with, you know, timbers popping off, massive gaps appearing, leaks, etc., etc., etc. Whereas in their sworn log form, they would have a certain amount of outer bark or pith.

[00:25:33]Hey, depending on how far down they they'd gone. I suspect given the photos, they're probably just plain down the contact surfaces. And that will give them the logs and a degree of protection against the salt and the water and the sun and so forth and make them less likely to warp in the first place. Plus, obviously, the outer coating of trees is designed to be somewhat waterproof anyway, which would help in the whole keeping the water out thing. Plus, of course, they are thicker, which means they're stronger, which means if they are faced with a battering from the sea of um then they're going to stand up to that somewhat better. And of course, you know, putting some kind of corking in between the logs to help support that is certainly well within their capabilities as opposed to cutting it down to timber, which apart from all the other issues I mentioned. A thinner plank of wood is going to be obviously necessarily weaker and so you'd end up doing a huge amount of work just to end up having to slap a whole ton of extra wood over it. Sable Lowry asks, "Generally, what makes makes one fire control system better than another? Specifically, what made the Admiral fire control system so good that it was unmatched by anybody else for over a decade?" Well, it's a whole combination of factors and I I kind of touched on it on my r in my rangef finding and fire control video, but to specifically go into the fire control systems themselves and exactly which advances were made when and why the adult multi fire control table as found in Nelson and Rodney was so much better than everyone else's for so long would probably require its own Wednesday video. But very briefly, you've got the number and fidelity of rangefinding systems. Obviously, for most of the time period, that's going to be optical rangefinding systems. In the Second World War, you're also talking about radar. Um, so, you know, there's the whole adage garbage and garbage out. You know, if you can have the world's best fire control system, if the rangefinders or the radar later on is not giving you correct range data, you are still going to miss things horribly. Uh then you've also got to have guns that can shoot with a reasonable spread of accuracy, which is quite handy to have. And once you com have those two things, so those are kind of more your external factors, you've then got to look at the fire control system itself, go right, how many variables is this system able to account for and how precisely can it account for them? because you've got all sorts of things including but not limited to temperature, humidity, wind speed potentially if you know it, wind speed at different altitudes, the direction the ship's facing, where you are relative north to south because we've got the corololis force and so forth. uh the curvature of the earth, enemy speed and bearing, your own speed and bearing, how those two relate to each other, and whether the system can run all of these and more calculations in a way that accounts for both sets.

[00:28:34]Because some early fire control systems assumed essentially a near static firing position. So you could say, "Okay, well my my enemy is doing this course and speed and I'm doing this course and speed and the fire control system would calculate for that." But if anything changed, particularly from your own course and speed, the baseline, you'd have to reset all the calculations. And obviously, as fire control systems got better and better, they could take more and more account of what the enemy was doing. So if the enemy began wildly maneuvering, you could account for it somewhat better. And one of the big breakthroughs was then also being able to account for first your own maneuvers and then progressively more and more severe maneuvers that you were accomplishing because you know with the older systems when you just put your own course and speed and it assumed that you were going at constant speed in a constant direction.

[00:29:30]Although you were moving in very very broad terms, it was only having to come up with one set of solutions. Whereas once you take into account your own varying course and speed, you're having to manage two completely different sets of diverging data and synthesize a single solution from all of that. So in the very very short answer is how many things can your fire control system actually deal with and with what precision can it deal with them and the more factors and the more precision and the faster it can deal with them the better the fire control system is and say going into specifically the Nelson and Rodney ad multi fire control table system will probably have to be its own whole video.

[00:30:16]Zen Knight asks, "You mentioned how the Thai Navy preserves old ships fairly well, even as far as saying they're a bit of an unsung hero for it. Uh, could you maybe cover what they've done in the future?" Yes. However, that would require me either going to Thailand or finding a Thai subscriber who is willing to go out and take a whole ton of photos from all sorts of weird and wonderful places. Because the Thai Navy seems to have, at least as far as I can tell, this habit of going, "A notable commemorative event has occurred.

[00:30:47]Therefore, we shall commemorate this event by making one of our ships into a museum ship, which you know is tied to commemorating that event as much as it is tied to commemorating the ship itself, which probably significantly helps with in terms of things like finding funding because letting such a vessel rot away then isn't just, oh, we're losing a bit of our naval history.

[00:31:11]It's also uh well if you do that you're also showing disrespect to whatever occasion or person that particular ship commemorates which um yeah you're going to get a bit more trouble for that in Thailand. So a short list of the ships that you can see in Thailand include not one but two Tacoma class frig. Um there are only three in the world uh left the other ones in Korea. There's also a rather interesting escort vessel which is this one which I think is the Mlong I believe. And this is a very rare example of an Imperial Japanese Navy ship. Well, not strictly an Imperial Japanese Navy ship because it was built specifically for the Thai Navy by the Japanese. But essentially, it's one of the very very very few surviving examples of a warship of any description that was built in Imperial Japanese Navy yards. Um, there's also a British mind sweeper from World War II, an Algerian class mine sweeper there. Um, for those of you who are perhaps looking for a more recent vessel, there's a Nox class frig hopping around somewhere in there. There's a pair of LSTs, both of the LST542 class.

[00:32:24]Um there are significant bits of a British World War I era destroyer um in uh one of their museums. And when I say significant bits, I mean also not just you know the guns and artifacts but actually significant sections of the ship structure which would be basically unique um in history cuz we don't certainly don't have many. There's also an Italian mid 1930s torpedo boat. It's not a speaker class, but very close to it. That's happily sitting around. And I'm pretty sure I've missed a few others. Now, one thing you'll notice, they are all pretty small. Frigots, destroyers, slopes, corvettes, that kind of thing. But well, that's the majority of the kind of ship the Thai Navy preserved. But even even then, you know, one, a lot of these ships are unique in their type in terms of preservation in the world period. And two, um, that's quite a large list. You know, there there are countries, far bigger countries with far more naval history than Thailand which have a lot fewer museum ships than that.

[00:33:35]And Ellis asks, "For the questions posted under each video for the dry dock, what is the process of actually choosing the ones you answer? Do you choose them shortly after the video goes live or when you begin the production of a dry dock? And how do you decide on the questions? So very broadly speaking, the questions that get answered in a dry dock like this are usually chosen about four to six weeks before the dry dock actually comes out.

[00:34:02]usually several months after the video actually goes live because what I try to do is essentially have a rolling system where I'm choosing the questions for a month's worth of dry docks. I'm then recording the answers to a month's worth of dry docks and then I'm also publishing a month's worth of dry docks at any given point. So in theory assuming the system works well let's say for example when this dry do goes live which should be in May during the month of May I will be publishing the May dry docks but I will be recording the majority of the answers to the questions for the June dry docks and I will be choosing which questions I want to answer for the July dry docks and basically just keeping them in a notepad. And as far as how I select them, in a typical week it will be five to six questions from each video. In a catchup, obviously has to be three or four questions from each video if they can all fit. And what I'll try and do is a combination of which questions have the most likes because if there's a question with a lot of likes to it, that means a fair number of people actually want that question answered. So, it's worth me then trying to answer it. Um, obviously I'm looking for questions I haven't answered before, or if I have answered before, it'd either be a really, really, really long time ago, or perhaps there's something new I can add.

[00:35:29]And I'm also looking for questions that I may not necessarily be certain of the answer of initially because sometimes I'll read a question, go, "Huh, I'd like to know the answer to that as well." And then I'll list it to answer. I'll do some research to see if I can find the answer. If I can find the answer, then obviously I'll present it. And as you'll have noted in some dry docks, I'll go well actually I don't know and either here's what I found or here would be my supposition. But then if anyone knows more, please let us know in the comments below. And that's essentially the process. I do look through pretty much all the questions in uh a video under the pinned post for uh choosing the questions, but obviously there is a bit of a ruthless process in getting what are usually three, four, five dozen questions down to half a dozen. Thou Decay asks, "On videos in history about steam powered ships at war, we often hear some variant of the bomb, torpedo, or mine hit temporarily cause the ship to lose power, but after some damage control efforts, power or some power was restored. Aside from flooding, what else causes the engines to shut off under attack so seemingly regularly? Are they ever temporarily shut down manually for safety?" Now, there's a whole laundry list of issues. So very briefly and non-exhaustively it could be that there as well as flooding which you mentioned which is a big hazard not just in terms of drowning but also because they certainly in World War I World War II era ships they tend to be electrical generators in the machinery spaces which you really do not want to be nearby when large amounts of water are getting in the area but there could also be smoke fire or threat of fire especially if the engine room or the boiler room more specifically is under forced pressure. If there's been a breach in the system somewhere that causes that over pressure to be lost, you can get flames jetting out of the boilers, which is obviously quite dangerous. Um, you can get smoke either from the boilers themselves or from some kind of damage to the funnel. There's shock damage which can trip power systems. Then even if the boiler itself doesn't strictly need power, you are going to have ancillary systems like say I don't know lighting um and in some cases fuel pumps um and if power is lost those things are lost.

[00:37:54]Shock can also interrupt steam traveling through the lines and cause either dangerous buildups or drops in pressure.

[00:38:02]Not to mention, of course, the shock can also cause cracks in the steam pipes which need to be covered.

[00:38:08]And yet, you're not going to be patching up a high-pressure steam line while it's venting. So, you'll need to shut that off. And if you shut that off, that means also you're shutting off power to the turbine or the vertical triple expansion engine. You can also have various mechanical elements knocked out of kilter, knocked out of line, knocked off balance and that can either cause things to shut down because system no work anymore or it can cause the system to be shut down as a preemptive safety measure because if things have potentially been knocked a little bit off and they keep going, it could could cause catastrophic failure. So you shut things down to make sure everything is going well. It can even be things like, you know, did the shock cause all the oil to jump out of the drip trays? And you do not want a large mechanical system running if the lubricant suddenly stopped being there. And this these and many other things can cause the temporary shutdown or in some cases perhaps permanent shutdown of elements of the ship's propulsion system. And then once you've addressed those issues, whether it be repowering the system, resetting bits, physically plugging steam leaks or all sorts of other things, then you can either restart those systems or you potentially might have that system offline permanently but be rerouting, say, steam pressure from other boilers if you can do so. And don't forget, you you can even have things like lime scale buildup or soot buildup and so forth.

[00:39:34]A significant enough shock can actually just knock those things loose and cause all sorts of fun in games when they get into the either the water system, the steam system, uh, or the furnaces and all the ancillary stuff like condensers and so forth, which is a lot more delicate than say a big vertical triple expansion engine. GFDX asks, I don't know if this is already planned for a later book review, but what is your opinion on the books written by Nicholas Jelico? I find his book about Jutland excellent and Scapperflow and the subs of World War I are good, too. I'd also be interested to hear if you think his familial relation to John Jelico might cause him to paint his grandfather in a better light. Well, obviously, we all have our own internal biases. Now, as historians, we can try and do as much as possible to mitigate those, but we have to acknowledge that they're there in the first place. However, with that said, um, and of course, Nicholas Jelico is Admiral Jelico's grandson, I think he does a very good job of not coming over as, well, this is my grandfather. These are all the cool things he did. Isn't he great?

[00:40:38]Fantastic. Rah. Um, he does paint Admiral Jelico in a fairly favorable light, but as you've probably guessed through the various um, videos that I've done on the channel, I also see Admiral Jelico in a fairly favorable light, as do a fair number of naval historians.

[00:40:53]Now, of course, that's not a universal opinion, particularly among the crowd who love Bey, but I guess no one's perfect.

[00:40:59]And of course, the thing is that having Admiral Jelico as your grandfather means that through his own father, so Admiral Jelico's son, since there's almost two decades between Admiral Jelico's passing and Nicholas Jelico being born, he's going to have something of a unique insight into the mind of Admiral Jelico that, well, is essentially going to be near enough unmatched in almost anyone else. Combine that with a decent amount of historical leg work and you end up with some pretty darn good books. I mean, I think of the three that he's written about his grandfather, that being Jelico's War, Jutland, The Unfinished Battle, and Last Days of the High Seas Fleet. Although, as you say, all of them are good. Um I my personal favorite if I had to pick between the three would be Jelico's war the yubot threat in World War I and the question of convoy because that is one of the areas where a very quick surface reading of the situation in World War I can end up with people going oh well Admiral Jelico clearly didn't know what he was doing because you know he refused to implement convoys and convoys retrospectively certainly are were the correct solution to dealing with the submarines And the book goes into extensive detail about why Admiral Jelico was resisting convoys. And turns out there, you know, unsurprisingly, there were some pretty good reasons behind it. Um, now yes, of course, there were downsides in terms of ships being sunk. But it wasn't just a case of I don't like convoys, therefore we're not doing it. Much in the same way as Admiral King gets criticized for not implementing convoys off the US East Coast in World War II. out. I would say that decision is perhaps open to a little bit more criticism, but again, it's a situation which on the surface can be very easy. Oh yeah, this Adon clearly didn't know what he was doing when people were telling him what the obvious solution was. Again, in that situation, there were some reasons why those systems weren't implemented. So, you have to take things in the balance.

[00:43:01]And you know, you also get all the work Admiral Jelico was doing on dealing with the anti- with anti-ubmarine warfare and the submarine threat. Yeah, he wasn't just sitting idle going, uh, we'll just carry on as normal and hope it all goes away. He was working exceptionally hard to deal with the sub threat. There's also a fourth book which Nicholas Jelico has written which is about his father.

[00:43:22]So Admiral Jelico's son um who continued in the military tradition and well he just went off and spent most of World War II in British special forces the SIS and the SPS you know just minor things like that and someday I'd really actually like to interview Nicholas Jelico. It's just a question of how and when. I mean, one, obviously, he's got to be interested in talking to me in the first place, but assuming that that is the case, it's then a question of, well, will he have a new book coming out at some point that we could discuss. Um, obviously ideally something more to do with World War I. Or alternatively, maybe um once I've wrapped up some of the other ongoing miniseries, maybe I do a video or a number of videos on Admiral Jelico. At which point, well, logically speaking, let's get his grandson in to talk about Admiral Jelico because, as I said, that's a pretty unique insight you're going to be able to get. Cone asks, "How often has it happened in an engagement where a ship's magazine has been literally empty from sending all of its shot or powder out the business end of its guns?" Very rarely has a ship expended every single scrap of ammunition it has. It did very occasionally happen in the Age of Sale, but the rate of fire of most Age of Sale ships and the fact that well, if you shot out all of your ammunition in a single engagement, unless your gunnery was truly terrible or there was some major intervening factor like the weather, you should have hit something enough times that one or the other of you would have given up by that point, did make it a very rare event. As time went on and the amount of ammunition decreased in terms of numbers of rounds carried as well as the interchangeability of ammunition going down, you do get a few instance which sort of could qualify. So for example, the cruisers Glouester and Fiji Glouster scene sinking here. While they didn't run out of all ammunition, they did run out of anti-aircraft ammunition. They still could afford a surface action, but well they were under attack by aircraft, so that didn't really help them all that much. So effectively they had emptied their magazines.

[00:45:28]There were of course a number of ships at places like the D-Day landings that pretty much emptied their magazines firing at shore targets. But again they still would have had some ammunition left in the form of a handful of main gun rounds for security battery rounds, anti-aircraft gun rounds, that kind of thing. But they were substantially out of ammo. You also have a number of desperate last stands like USS Samuel B. Roberts, which famously was down to flinging star shells at various targets once they'd burned through pretty much everything else they had on board. And in terms of prolonged operations rather than a single engagement, there are also a few cases of submarines operating down to the very last bit of ammunition. uh such as one or two submarines in the Pacific campaign in the latter stages of it, having expended all their torpedoes and then having expended all their deck gun ammunition and then having expended all of their autoc cannon ammunition, whether that be 20 mil or 40 mil and having to resort to essentially hand weapons and ramming to sink the last few ships before deciding they should probably go home. Rob Smith asks, "These questions will be being answered after DRA has done his special dry do number 400. So now he must be turning his attention to the ultra special dry do number 500 due in a little under two years. Is DRA prepared to lift the curtains on what this really special event will be? Or is it even more secret than one could possibly imagine?" I don't know about more secret than one could possibly imagine. I mean, I do have just about two years to prepare for it, but uh depending on how things work out, there could be any number of things that I could do for dry do 500. I could release a book. I've got a couple that are currently in the works. Um I could commission some special perhaps dry do themed artwork or something like that.

[00:47:24]Or I could host some kind of streaming event. Maybe we all go and play Masa Royal Rumble in World of Warships again or something equally silly like that.

[00:47:33]Ideas in the comments below. Wyoming Iceberg asks, "Inspired by the question 2 hours 37 minutes and 32 seconds of dry do 33399 part one. Who is your favorite admiral of all time and why?" I suspect your top six in Ascending Order are Fischer, Spruce, King, Cunningham, Nimits, and Nelson. But I'm prepared to be surprised, especially as you picked King Arthur the Great as your favorite before 1500.

[00:47:59]Well, much as other kind of favorite things, favorite ship, favorite tactic, etc., etc., This kind of is on a little bit of a rotating loop with me because I have a whole slew of favorite admirals and then essentially depending on what I'm reading most recently that might cover them or what aspect of naval history I might be researching which one edges in front of for being my favorite admiral changes quite often. But I would say based on some work I've been doing recently, an admiral who does pop to the top of the list relatively often over the past few months has been Admiral Hawk. You and not not listed on your suspected list, but no, I I really like Hawk. Now, he does have a few flaws which actually makes him a bit more relatable, but as a tactician and as an absolutely determined commander, I think he definitely ranks very highly up there in the realms of the Royal Navy and is severely underappreciated in my opinion.

[00:49:05]Uh, considering that he does the whole we're outnumbered, stuff it, we're going to attack them and win anyway thing before Nelson does. And of course he is the admiral in charge of my favorite battle of all time hands down which is the battle of Kibbron Bay. U more on that well actually later both cuz I have a a video series on Hawk coming up and also uh recently I did a podcast with all about the battle of Gibron Bay. So I'll try and include a link to that in the video description so you can have a listen to that as well.

[00:49:38]Lo Spencer asks, "Could the weight of naval armor have been reduced by drilling out small holes or sections of armor plating, thus reducing the overall mass of the armor while still not having any holes large enough for an incoming shell to simply pass through? For example, drilling out several hundred 1-in diameter holes across an armor belt of a large ship. My guess is that this would have some delitrius effect or else someone would have already done it.

[00:50:05]Yeah, there are quite a few good reasons why you don't want to be doing that with naval armor, but one of the biggest reasons is simply that while you are reducing the weight, you're also significantly reducing the strength of the armor. So, here's a piece of armor that's been shot through by a shell. And you can kind of see how the impact which is in the opposite side has propagated through the material as it's uh there's the shell and the shock wave that it's generated has passed through it. And you see the same thing if you look at the video I did on splinters quite a while ago where you know solid shot impacted on wood has a similar cone like projection of a shock wave which is what detaches very large splinters even if the cannonball itself might be relatively speaking small. Now the problem of course if it comes to this kind of grid armor type system is that the armor's ability to resist penetration is in part based on the sheer strength and the tensile strength and to a certain degree even the compressive strength depending on which particular aspect of the mechanics of penetration you're looking at of the armor itself.

[00:51:22]So obviously the shell physically doesn't expand out in a cone like this as it goes through. So that outer edge is almost entirely the shock wave and the force of the penetration. And that means that putting it very crudely, in a penetration event like this, that energy has to be that's been transmitted by the shell to the armor has to be sufficient to essentially tear off this entire chunk of metal, which involves an awful lot of energy. Um, now of course that when you get to high impact collision physics, you start to look at things more like a liquid than a solid for the brief moments of impact, but that's a whole other video and a whole other discussion. Nonetheless, coming back to the point, if you have a gritted system or some kind of mesh system of armor, the fact is that there is less material to resist the impact. So if you imagine that this was some kind of grided system, you can immediately see that well if there's less material there then you need less energy to break through it which means you'd end up needing thicker armor to resist the penetration which negates the whole weight saving principle of it. Plus it would be a bit of a maintenance nightmare considering the armor runs at the water line. So you'd be getting water intrusion constantly.

[00:52:46]And on top of that, it's not just about there's less material, therefore there is less strength. So, you know, let's say you remove 30% of material. That doesn't just drop the strength by 30%.

[00:52:57]It actually drops it by considerably more because what you've then created is a series of small individual elements of armor, the essentially the solid bits between the holes. And because they lack the support depending on the direction that the shock wave is coming but let's say hor horizontal support so perpendicular to the direction of travel of the shock wave because they now lack the support of surrounding material that you consider them each as isolated components and that means the total amount of energy needed to break them is considerably less. So, it's not just about removing a certain amount of material, it's what's left is now actually significantly weaker.

[00:53:43]And the minute one of those sections fractures under the impact, then obviously all other remaining sections are subjected to more force, which makes them more likely to fracture and chain reaction. And yeah, the the amount of force that's required to then break through the armor is massively less. So that's the primary material reason why you wouldn't do it among various others.

[00:54:10]AB Coats asks following on from the question in dry do 399 why did the US insist on only using commodors instead of admirals in the 19th century and why did they switch to using admirals instead of commodors?

[00:54:25]Initially the resistance to admirals was one of those slightly weird ideological issues with the at that that point brand new United States. So the US ostensibly of course founded with a relatively anti- monarchist sentiment but some of the things they picked to say these things are monarchist or reminiscent of royalty or nobility and therefore should be rejected including the rank of admiral. Some of those choices were a little inexplicable because at the same time they also chose to adopt and keep other things which were actually at least to an outside observer very much more closely related to the trappings of royalty. But for you know whatever reasons were occurring in the late 1700s. they decided that the rank of admiral was, you know, far too close to being a noble title or whatever perhaps because many British admirals up until that point had been members of the aristocracy.

[00:55:25]But in any case, they said, well, we don't need an admiral. But then very quickly ran into the issue, as I mentioned in that previous answer, of well, we have people who are in command of more than one ship and we need some way of differentiating them from all the other captains in that formation. and hence Commodore sort of slid in there.

[00:55:45]Plus, there was constant back and forth between the US Navy and Congress with the US Navy pointing out that their seniormost officers could only really be informally known as commodors. And that would cause some significant problems because you could have a what for a European Navy was a relatively junior officer perhaps with a l r rank of rear admiral and they would by convention outrank somebody who perhaps had been in naval service with the US Navy for considerably longer and therefore by all rights would be more senior and in a European navy would have had a vice admiral full admiral's rank but by social convention had to defer to the actually junior rear admiral because his rank was still superior and this so this went back and forth for a while. Then you get in the 1850s they start to go okay maybe we should have something. So initially this as someone mentioned in the comments in the previous video which I think I also alluded to in my answer but essentially in the late 1850s they go okay well we'll have flag officers so they're essentially granting an admiral rank just without calling it admiral.

[00:56:54]And then in the 1860s I go, "Okay, fine.

[00:56:57]We'll have admirals."

[00:56:59]Commodore actually stays around as a rank alongside that of Admiral throughout the 19th century. It then disappears.

[00:57:09]And for reasons which are not entirely clear to me with the US Navy over the 20th century, the rank of Commodore disappears and reappears and disappears and reappears and disappears again. And I don't know whether it's around now or not, but they keep bringing it back and then dropping it for some reason and which in part explains why for certain periods the rear admiral rank in the US Navy has two halves because essentially the lower rank half of being a rear admiral is actually the commodore rank just wearing a different skin suit. And finally for this week, Sir Lawrence Vaneken asks, "Why did the EA class get the battle carrier conversion instead of the Fusso class? They're older and of course of somewhat less value in the battle line, and they look to have a better layout for it.

[00:57:58]So firstly, the fussos were supposed to follow the essays into this battle carrier conversion, but there were quite a lot of factors in the selection of the essays as opposed to the fussos as the first ships.

[00:58:13]Initially, the main thing was well, you wanted to do this quickly and cheaply because you needed some form of carry capacity urgently. And the Japanese really liked to operate their big ships in pairs. You see that with the carriers, you see that with their battleships as well. And in this particular case, the single biggest reason between choosing the Esayes versus the Fussos was simply the fact that Huga had suffered a turret explosion. So the EA pair was not complete unless Huga was repaired. And it would take time and money to repair Huga. And well, it was therefore cheaper and easier to convert both Huga and Eay than it would be to take the Fussos, which could still operate as a battle pair according to Japanese Navy doctrine, and convert them into carriers while also repairing Huga for a brief period on the front line as a full-on battleship. But there are a number of other smaller issues as well which would favor the conversion of the EAS. Firstly, the EAS are fractionally faster, fractionally more powerful, which obviously helps. Another thing is that the certainly by their early 1940s configuration, the EES have somewhat less aft superructure than the Fussos, which of course means less disrupted air around their little flight deck-atapult section. Now, of course, it's not going to necessarily be landing aircraft on said flight deck, but you, you know, even for catapult launches and general aircraft handling, having very disrupted air currents isn't really a good thing.

[00:59:50]So, if you use the EAS, you can mitigate that mostly by just well, there isn't that much superructure as you can see.

[00:59:57]Whereas, if you look at pictures of the Fussos, they've got quite much more substantial after superructure, which could cause problems unless you went through the time and expense of cutting it down.

[01:00:08]And beyond that, you've also got the issue that yes, while in theory having the Fusso layout where you've got one turret for and one turret after in the middle uh of the central funnel, at least by again by the 1940s layout, whereas the EAS have this super firing pair that's slightly further aft. The simple fact is because it is a superfiring pair and turret number four is therefore somewhat lower down, it's easier at the level of the flight deck to conduct operations above and around it. Whereas if you look at the actual extent of the EA's flight deck and superimpose that over a Fusso plan, you realize very quickly that turret 4 on the Fussos being somewhat higher mounted would have somewhat interfered with those operations.

[01:00:56]And again in terms of minimizing the cost and disruption of reconfiguring the ship, the secondary battery layout of the fussos with the casement guns runs all the way to the after superructure.

[01:01:07]Whereas with the EAS, the casement secondary battery is clustered from the funnel forward or funnels in earlier configuration. Now, as you can see in this picture, that casement battery was ultimately suppressed in favor of a heavier anti-aircraft battery, but it meant that while the work was ongoing, you could have work on the guns essentially very much forward of the ship, work on the aircraft bit in the aft of the ship, thus making it quicker to do. Whereas with a Fusso conversion, there'd be a lot of people stepping on each other's toes at the interface of the two. So there's lots of minor reasons why if you want a quick and easy conversion for a given value thereof, the EAS will be able to do it just a little bit faster than the Fouseos anyway, even without the the really big sword damage issue, which is that it's not entirely combat operational at the point the decisions being made. And that brings us to an end for this week's dry do. Thank you very much for watching everybody. I hope you've enjoyed it and I hope to see you again in another video soon. Bye for now.