Iowa vs Yamato comparison

[Thumpalumpacus]

Anything coming to your mind? I have an only shallow understanding, so I have no idea what mainstream opinions and what are more unconventional ideas are.

Oh, I've watched so many of his videos, they all sort of smear together. His love affair with HMS Hood is peculiar to my American reading. Even after the hypothetical refit with upgrades he suggests, I still think it couldn't and shouldn't try to stand up to a proper battleship. He thinks otherwise iirc.

 

[SaparotRob]

I think Drachinifel may have been alluding to HMS Hood's classification. It seems the RN classified a ship as a battle cruiser by speed rather than armour (armor). By this metric, the Iowas would have been classified as battle cruisers had they been built by the RN. He brought it up somewhere in one of his many videos.

 

[Acheron]

In his video about the sinking of the Hood, he claimed that in all likelihood, it was an incredibly lucky shell of the Bismarck that blew up the Hood, does this stand up to scrutiny? His points were compelling, but I lack the expertise to judge them.

 

[The Basket]

To me Hood is a battleship and so if given suitable modification would be a battleship still.

Not Yamato or Iowa but certainly on a par with a QE or Nagato.

The loss of Hood will never be known but the idea of the loss is reasonable or plausible.

There was a magazine explosion. How did that happen?

The concept of diving shells is certainly plausible as the IJN played with them and PoW had a dud shell in her hull. So unlikely though it may be, it is more likely than other unlikely scenarios and fits the evidence available.

 

[Thumpalumpacus]

I think Drachinifel may have been alluding to HMS Hood's classification. It seems the RN classified a ship as a battle cruiser by speed rather than armour (armor). By this metric, the Iowas would have been classified as battle cruisers had they been built by the RN. He brought it up somewhere in one of his many videos.

He refers to her as a "fast battleship", which it certainly ain't. He also calls the Ugly Sisters "battleships" even though their guns are 4" smaller than Hood's -- while calling Alaskas "cruiser-killers" despite superior armament and comparable armor to the S&G. There's creaky stuff there.

IMO, and that's all, Hood, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Alaska ,and Guam are all battle-cruisers of varying capability. Throwing in "battleship" or "fast battleship" doesn't change the fact that none of them could stand up to battleship-grade armament, as Hood and Scharnhorst both showed.

 

[SaparotRob]

I don't know what a battle cruiser is but I know one when I see one.

 

[The Basket]

My view that Scharnhorst was a battleship and had she had her 15 inches guns she would have been formidable.

Alaska has armour akin to Renown so that's ok for cruisers but bad against anything bigger.

But kinda getting into choppy waters of semantics and naval history.

And Hood was a battleship of sorts. Old and behind though she maybe. A ship like Iowa very much skews the definition of battleship and really is a quantum leap over the leftover ww1 stuff.

 

[Shortround6]

Battleships went through quite a bit of evolution 25 years. Not as much as fighters planes from 1916 to 1941 but there was a considerable difference.

Unless you study the armor diagrams (and the construction) the Alaska is confusing. A simple of list of thickness doesn't work out well.
The Alaska was pretty much a scaled up Baltimore class cruiser. But it also confused as the internal subdivision got better from 1916/1918 ships to 1930s ships.

The USN always called the Alaska a large cruiser, never a battlecruiser. What the newspapers or book authors or even what PR guys called it was different.

The Hood got called a lot of things by the press over 20 years, She might have been justified in some cases as being a fast battleship in 1920s.
But her deck armor was never good enough for that to stick once the 1930s battleships showed up. She was trapped by her own ledged. She was too new and valuable to be given the extended dockyard refit that would have to really helped her out.

 

[The Basket]

The story of the Hood is certainly the Ship she was and the ship she is and the ship she will never be.

Hood was too busy waving the flag and putting on the miles for refit.

And when war started she was the only RN big gun ship to have the speed and firepower and armour to catch and match the Scharnhorsts and to a lesser extent, the Deutschlands. So no refit.

Whether on that fateful day, she was fighting fit and should even faced Bismarck is a valid point. But then again, an admiral who didn't join in battle was not up to the Nelson tradition.

6 of one and half dozen of the other.

 

[EwenS]

For those from the USA wanting to know more about Hood, a good place to start is the Hood Association website.

H.M.S. Hood Association-Battle Cruiser Hood

www.hmshood.org.uk

 

[Acheron]

Regarding classifications, especially when it comes to battleships vs battlecruisers vs fast battleships, I believe this is topic of much discussion? AFAIK, drachinfel talked about this in some videos, pretty sure when it came to the Alaskas, maybe also the Scharnhorsts.

To me, the first thing to clear up by what principle one divides the big ladies up. One could go by classification or intended role of the creator. I am a bit iffy about that though, as it seems too subjective to me and could be changed by the creator changing their mind. For objective criteria though, I read that while British WWI battlecruisers sacrificed armor for speed, their German counterparts instead sacrificed firepower for speed, not sure how much armor they retained, but it does complicate things further of course.

 

[The Basket]

Was the Deutschland class battlecruisers?
I could say it was…from a certain point of view.
It was faster than a battleship and had heavy armament and was certainly designed to fight cruisers.

Was Iowa a battlecruiser? Yes as its speed allowed it to do battlecruiser duties as well as commerce raiding and commerce protection.

So when does a dagger become a sword?

The German battlecruisers were designed to fight British battlecruisers. So the Invincibles and Indefatigable. The later British battlecruisers such as Tiger and Lion had more armour so they could fight out with the Von Der Tann and Goeben.

So when we talk about poorly armoured British Battlecruisers, we are not talking about the Hood or Lion or Renown. We are talking about the Invicibles and the Indefatigables.

The battlecruiser didnt sacrifice armour as it was only supposed to be armoured against cruisers in the first place. It needed speed to catch up with the cruisers.

 

[Acheron]

To separate the heavy cruisers from the battlecruisers, could we argue that the later must have guns that can at threaten a battleship? Or do ordinary heavy cruisers qualify for this already?

 

[The Basket]

An 8 inch shell from a cruiser will not penetrate battleships armour.

See Prinz Eugen v Hood or PoW.

Prinz Eugen was only a minor threat to Hood but Hood could have one shotted Prinz Eugen like a knife through butter.

A British Battlecruiser always had the gun of the equivalent battleship.

Renown 15 inch same as QE.
Invincible 12 inch same as Dreadnought.
Tiger 13.5 inch same as Iron Duke.

So gun wise same as the contemporary battleship although may have less in a different arrangement.

So a British Battlecruiser will have battleship big guns. A cruiser will not. Also a cruiser has thin armour as they are designed against other cruisers and destroyers.

 

[SaparotRob]

As I understand it, a battlecruiser is a large battleship sized hull (or even longer, for speed) without the heavier armor. It carries battleship grade main battery firepower and can out gun any cruiser or outrun any battleship. As calibre increased, the distinctions started to blur. The Sisters (Scharnhorst and Gneisenau) may have been designed for larger calibre guns but were instead fitted with 11" guns. They were equivalent to earlier WW 1 dreadnoughts especially considering their armor. The DKM was behind the curve in building large warships thanks to the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles.
The Alaskas were large heavy cruisers as they were essentially scaled up Baltimores. What makes it "fuzzy" is that the Alaskas had 12" guns. That was not up to par with MOST U.S. battleships but was a common calibre for WW 1 dreadnoughts.
So the Sisters were battleships with 11" guns while the Alaskas were large heavy cruisers with 12" guns.
Political correctness aside, I think of the Alaskas as battlecruisers.

 

[WARSPITER]

An 8 inch shell from a cruiser will not penetrate battleships armour.

See Prinz Eugen v Hood or PoW.

Prinz Eugen was only a minor threat to Hood but Hood could have one shotted Prinz Eugen like a knife through butter.

A British Battlecruiser always had the gun of the equivalent battleship.

Renown 15 inch same as QE.
Invincible 12 inch same as Dreadnought.
Tiger 13.5 inch same as Iron Duke.

So gun wise same as the contemporary battleship although may have less in a different arrangement.

So a British Battlecruiser will have battleship big guns. A cruiser will not. Also a cruiser has thin armour as they are designed against other cruisers and destroyers.

Good points here.Tabletop gaming rules are often skewed towards Cruisers and Destroyers lasting more than one turn which makes them
more dangerous to larger ships than they actually were. The latest set we have tried is far more "real" as a hit from larger type on a smaller
type gets more damage dice,. For example, if a battleship hits a cruiser with it's main guns instead of one damage dice per gun hit the number
goes as high as 8 per hit. Nasty as it is for the gamer it is a realistic outcome.

In other words cruisers and destroyers were not in a good place against anything with functional large guns, just as a frigate had no place in
the battle line during the age of sail.

 

[SaparotRob]

Good points here.Tabletop gaming rules are often skewed towards Cruisers and Destroyers lasting more than one turn which makes them
more dangerous to larger ships than they actually were. The latest set we have tried is far more "real" as a hit from larger type on a smaller
type gets more damage dice,. For example, if a battleship hits a cruiser with it's main guns instead of one damage dice per gun hit the number
goes as high as 8 per hit. Nasty as it is for the gamer it is a realistic outcome.

In other words cruisers and destroyers were not in a good place against anything with functional large guns, just as a frigate had no place in
the battle line during the age of sail.

Did you ever play Avalon-Hill's "Jutland"?

 

[Shortround6]

Again there had been major changes in ships in just 10-12 years.

And it was was not as simple as it seemed.
Saying that battlecruiser sacrificed armor for speed was a gross simplification. The Invincible class was about 40 ft longer than the Bellerophon and had one less turret. The Invincible had 41 boilers and 41,000 hp compared to the Bellerophon's 18 boilers and 23,000 hp.
Yes, the battlecruiser had to make sacrifices, but some of it was making room for the docks and water to float the ship at the quayside. Ship size went up quickly.
For the British they didn't make some of the machinery improvements they could have quite soon enough which lead to large and heavy engine rooms which to larger hulls which then led to thinner armor to house the larger engine/boilers rooms.
German Battlecruisers in most of WW I used small tube boilers which didn't require such as much boiler space for the same power. Yes, the Germans did use one size smaller guns but that didn't make a larger part of the difference in of the size.
Germans also figured righty or wrongly that the higher velocity smaller German guns would still have enough power to the penetrate the British ships in most of the sea conditions in the North Sea. The North sea was not friendly to long range duels.

By the time of the Hood the British had switched to small tube boilers and oil fuel. The Dreadnought was built on 184lbs per shaft hp. The Hood was planned on 84lbs per shaft hp.
The Hood credited with 33% of it's displacement to protection/armor.
The Invincible was 20%
The Nelson was 29%
The KGV (1936) was 36%
The Hindenburg (1917) was 34%

A very good argument could be made for the Hood being a fast battleship. Especially considering it used sloped armor that was 2-3" more effective than vertical armor.
Her deck armor was a different story but just about nobody else had decent deck armor either.

 

[WARSPITER]

Did you ever play Avalon-Hill's "Jutland"?

Unfortunately no. Our games are generally tabletop with miniatures along with liberal use of non polite society words usually directed
at an innocent party (dice for the most part).

 

[Shortround6]

To separate the heavy cruisers from the battlecruisers, could we argue that the later must have guns that can at threaten a battleship? Or do ordinary heavy cruisers qualify for this already

Sort sort of depends.
The Deutschland was a special circumstance, she had 11'' guns but her armor wasn't going to provide much protection to 8" guns

We also have another anomaly in that most Navies stopped making large heavy cruisers from around 1910 to the 1920s. And most of the 1905-1910 armor cruisers ships were already under construction when the Dreadnaught battleship caught the world by surprise.
The Washington treaty cruisers became defacto battleships as only few battleships were allowed to built.
The New 8in cruisers also had the most up to date fire control they could obtain which meant they could influenced the battle even it they might costly.
As older Battleships were refitted with newer fire control and with high (25-30 degree) elevation gun mounts they became much better to deal with the 8" gadflies.