Kuniworth Posted February 25, 2003 Share Posted February 25, 2003 You guys ever played fighting steel from SSI?? I did a test, put Yamato and Musashi 500 yards from Bismarck and Tirpitz and let them fire upon each other with their broadsides. Result? Japanese victory. Longer range probably diffrent result due to superior german range-finding. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Valadictum Posted February 25, 2003 Share Posted February 25, 2003 Early days of all welded hulls were a bit hit and miss for the British. They tried it on one of the classes of destroyers and found the seams were coming apart too easily. It was down to inexperience of the welders. They went back to rivets for wartime construction until the very end. One of the reasons why American destroyers seemed to be more robust than British ones and could be built quicker too. Interesteing observation I've found on the internet was if you pit the Yamato vs an Iowa class, the Iowa would probably come out on top. This was because the 18` guns on the Japanese ships were of a fairly old construction technique (or something like that anyway) while the Iowa's had more modern guns. The result was that the broadsides of both types were of about the same weight in shells and the Iowa's could fire faster and had longer barrel life. The American ships also had radar and would have been more accurate. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Panzer39 Posted February 25, 2003 Share Posted February 25, 2003 Fighting Steel is Great game I still play it all the time. If you havent checked out FSP,the fighting steel project head over to this link now. http://www.navalwarfare.org/ They have added the French and Italian navies and made a number of other improvements. Also check out the link to FSNA. It adds a dynamic campain to Fighting Steel that I worked on and still work on ocasionally. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve C Posted February 25, 2003 Share Posted February 25, 2003 I recently got a fascinating book, The World's Worst Warships by Anthony Preston. The Hood has its own chapter. As stated well above, though it had the displacement of a battleship, the Hood was essentially WW1 battlecruiser technology and the thin deck armor was vulnerable to the plunging fire occuring at long ranges. Here's a link to the book. The German Graf Spee class and the Bismarck are in it too. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1557500045/qid=1046190902/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-1577660-8752621?v=glance&s=books Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JerseyJohn Posted February 25, 2003 Share Posted February 25, 2003 Steve C. Very interesting. I like the cover of that thing, the vessel (?!) depicted will probably turn out being futuristic! For some reason the British were in love with the Hood. They sent it all over the world on good will tours between the wars. I guess if it had avoided the Bismarck battle nobody would remember it today and it would be thought of as a great vessel. It was really intended for an age when Battleships chugged along at 20 knots. The Deutschland class Pocket BBs, or armored cruisers, or armored ships, were a desperate stopgap. As Panzer39 mentioned earlier, their original stated purpose was to escort convoys. I guess they'd have been pretty good in that role, protecting some destroyers so they could protect the merchantmen/freighters. The Bismarck and Tirpitz had that rudder problem, also the fact their communications and gunnery radar were too exposed. All the result of not having working models of big ships in the 20s and 30s to learn from -- the original layout is really based on where their WW I ideas left off. They were also critized for not having an adequate torpedo barrier, but that might be hindsight knowledge. Despite all these things the Kriegsmarine was planning to compound the mistake by building the larger Hindenburg class which was pretty much the Bismark with 16" guns. The Heavy cruisers, Blucher, Prinz Eugen, and Seydlitz were also built along the same lines; smaller, faster Bismarcks with 8" guns. They were well built in any case, the Bismarck too a hell of a pounding -- though not much of it from the more damaging plunging fire -- before going down, most likely by scuttling. The Prinz Eugen survived two A-bomb tests at the Bikini Atoll and was sunk by naval fire. And the Graf Spee, after crippling the heavy 8" cruiser Exeter and fending off the 6" cruisers Ajax and Achilles at the River Platte, could have left Montevideo and put to sea at nearly top speed had it not been for the German embassy's hallucinations and British disinformation. [ February 25, 2003, 01:00 PM: Message edited by: JerseyJohn ] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve C Posted February 26, 2003 Share Posted February 26, 2003 Originally posted by JerseyJohn: Steve C. Very interesting. I like the cover of that thing, the vessel (?!) depicted will probably turn out being futuristic! LOL, it's the Novgorod . Circular hulled Russian 19th century battleship designed for duty in the Black Sea. They built two of these, actually 10 were on the drawing boards but the Russians came to their senses and cancelled the balance of the program when they found out that despite multiple screws, the darn thing wouldn't steam in a straight line. Here's a link to a model of it. http://www.steelnavy.com/Modelkrak%20NovgorodJB.htm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JerseyJohn Posted February 26, 2003 Share Posted February 26, 2003 Steve Hit the link, saw the evidence, my hair's on edge, eyes are still wide open and I can't get them to blink! Those boys were locked in by ice for too long. They liked it because it reminded them of a hockey puck. [ February 25, 2003, 06:53 PM: Message edited by: JerseyJohn ] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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