Naval History Forums

Warspite certainly had a very modern FC system and her 15" guns could destroy any potential opponent, but even with the rebuild Warspite did not have enough armour to slug it out with a modern battleship. Her armour layout was similar to Hood's and her main belt was really too shallow for good ...

This is a cross section of New Jersey, taken from the plans available at HNSA:



The Class B armour is shaded in dark blue, and the keyed area between the two types of armour is clearly shown.

The RN had ASDIC right from the beginning and introduced 10cm radar to escort vessels in mid to late 1941. There was shortage of escort vessels in 1941, but had Germany been building more u-boats earlier, the UK would have responded with increased emphasis on escort construction and may have allocat...

I don't think your basic premise is well supported. I don't think anyone has ever attempted to quantify the differences between a pom-pom and a bofors before, so this premise has simply been ignored. The USN did compare the Bofors and pom-pom very carefully in a series of trials, yet did not note, ...

I misunderstood. The shell that hit Bismarck exploded just above the double bottom then? That isn't what Thorsten's picture implies. The information I have is that Iowa's lower side belt is 12.1" tapering to 1.625" at the bottom. I guessed at 4" at the impact point, but that seems re...

The Bofors was reckoned to be twice as effective as the pom-pom against torpedo planes, though not much better against very close targets such as kamikazes. Naval Weapons of WW2, p.80 This is commonly stated, yet if we examine the actual ballistics and shell weight/burster size, it seems to be base...

Many cruisers did surrender a main armament turret, but in this case Achilles also had X turret destroyed by the bomb hit.

Thanks, that's very interesting.

If you look at page 4 of this thread you will note that the gunnery officer of HMS Dehli stated that the 5"/38 could maintian a rate of 25 rounds/minute. A reference link is given there. I know that the gun cannot fire at 25 rpm for long periods because it would overheat, and even 15 RPM for 5...

I doubt that 25RPM was possible during combat, but that's not the point. For bombardment purposes, the planners had to decide what was a reasonable RoF for extended periods, and I suspect that 10 RPM was chosen because higher RoFs might lead to overheating, with potentially fatal consequences for th...

The document below lists the RoF of various USN weapons, for planning purposes, for a 5 minute period. This 'sustained' RoF is somewhat lower than the maximum figures commonly quoted for these weapons: Battery______________5"/25__5"/38___6"/47__8"/55 RoF/Minute-5 minutes____10___...

This is a pretty good site for listing mods and armament changes:

http://www.navypedia.org/ships_index.htm

You have the first hit plotted at about 19400 yds, when the range on PoW's salvo chart is 21150 yds. I assumed that the first hit you plotted must have come from salvo 7, fired at 19825 yds. How do you account for the large variation in range between your chart and PoW's, for salvo 6?

Some rangeplot´s I did based on primary source material and Antonio Bonomi´s paper on DS. First for PRINCE OF WALES engaging BISMARCK. A few observations I made: http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/8105/rangeplot.jpg [A] note the large initial error in range note how PoW stepped down the range in br...

This was Achilles armament after her 1943/44 refit: The rearming of the Achilles involved the removal of one of her after-turrets, thus reducing the number of her 6-inch guns from eight to six. Four additional 4-inch dual-purpose guns were mounted, increasing the number of these weapons to eight. Th...