Domus Acipenseris

Try this book

http://www.amazon.ca/Red-God-War-Soviet-Artillery/dp/0080312004

GeoPoliticalFutures which is a subscriber only site has its take on events keeping in mind it has multiple contributors from around the world but is American focused.
 
* Prior to invasion a rumour they heard Russia was offered a deal, the USA stays out of Ukraine but Russia must stay out of Belarus, it was declined.
* Russian strategy was politically driven to scare Ukraine into signing an agreement and to undermine Nato via the new German government wanting the invasion problem to go away, Germany caved under western pressure and Ukraine resistance was higher than expected when Russia rolled in.
* Russian armed forces were operating like something out of the cold war with large armoured formations and all the problems that incurs,  puzzled why the internet is still active etc (no war is clean and you definitely don't want it broadcast to the world of today), decisions may be have been politically made rather than what's best tactically.
* The Ukrainian armed forces have dispersed requiring Russian infantry units having to sweep areas clear before armour can push through, the west is flooding Ukraine with infantry anti-armour weapons.
* The Russian Air Force has not much to hit targets wise (not because its incapable).
* Russia needs a quick win and cannot let this drag on which is what the west wants.
 
Economics
* If Russia can survive the initial shock from global sanctions it will be fine in the long run, also sanctions sometimes can have the opposite effect and actually help domestic production and technology, Russia is self reliant in many areas but will loose access to high end technology and luxury goods from the west.
* Huge risks in wheat and fertilizer production, Russia and Ukraine are both major global suppliers, if conflict drags on it will badly affect North Africa the main customers which could in turn fuel instability in an already fragile part of the world.
 
What some in the west fear the most is that a Eurasian alliance forms with its own international finance institutions and technology it hasn't happened yet but this could accelerate its creation, the USA is going to be working overtime to keep China and Russia apart.
 
How things play out remains to be seen, the west has done as much as it can without direct war, either Putin gets a compromise deal with west (no way they allow it at this point but months from now attitudes may change) or Russia breaks Ukrainian morale and forces a surrender.
 
My own view on this talk of insurgency is made by people with not much understanding, Ukraine is not Afghanistan, if Russia were to occupy all of Ukraine;
* Ukraine is not a poor/undeveloped country its citizens have something to loose, bills to pay, going to school etc. they cannot afford to send their sons off to die.
* Ukraine is flat there is not many places to hide.
* Russia has a fairly effective secret police in putting down revolts once military occupation ends.
* Ukraine/Russia share language/culture/religion, Russians are not strangers to Ukraine something the Soviets and Americans failed to understand in Afghanistan.
* Entry points into Ukraine via EU can be policed by Russian "peace keeping" forces and resupplied via Belarus, Afghanistan was surrounded by unfriendly countries to USA.
 
This action by Putin defiantly backfired when it comes to Nato which was falling apart all on its own, as Macron pointed out much to the anger of western elites a few years ago. Now Nato is fully rejuvenated, Germany is going to re-arm which is going to be another problem (many in Europe are nervous about Germany with large military). The USA has gotten new military bases in EU countries Denmark/Romania and support for Nato has sky rocketed in Sweden/Finland, Turkey is being brought in from the cold. All anti-Russia hard liners are now politically untouchable in the west.

Michael Kofman's thread from yesterday is worth a read IMO:
 
 

Antonov An-225 destroyed in Ukraine conflict?
 
https://www.traveller.com.au/the-anton-an225-the-largest-plane-ever-built-may-have-been-destroyed-h220l2

Microfighter concepts.  https://ke.kz/en/press-center/defence-industry/1393/

Microfighter concepts.  https://ke.kz/en/press-center/defence-industry/1393/

Models for aerodynamics tests in TsAGI:
https://saidpvo.livejournal.com/1085146.html
Myasishchev M-50 and it's next version

 
 
   Some wacky design from Myasishchev OKB

 
Supersonic passanger plane

 
And other projects and UAVs:
 

So, Sherman vs Panther is a topic that has been chewed over on this forum until only gristle remains. I accordingly have very little to add except to urge the newer members to dig into some of our older threads.
 
In terms of chronological progression vs what hindsight tells us - as @Sturgeon has stated, a T-44/T-54 was entirely within the state of the art in 1939. If aircraft seem to have more quickly arrived at a local optimum, it's partly a function of more resources being poured into them than tanks*, partly a function of the relative utility of outdated models^, and partly a function of different operational and strategic tradeoffs.
 
Tanks are rigidly constrained by fuel supply lines, bridge sizing, tunnel width and train gauges. The result is that you want to get along with the smallest, lightest, most mobile vehicle you can until such time as it isn't tenable any more. With aircraft, the major limitation of runways only kicks in at the very frontline, and accordingly puts hard constraints only on shorter-ranged types such as interceptors and tactical support aircraft. Even then, this mostly bites around the point where jet aircraft become common and landing speeds start to balloon.
 
 
*Resources put into tank vs. aircraft production in WW2 are uniformly almost impossible to directly quantify given wildly fluctuating budgets, the different strategic resources needed by each, the inaccuracies of stated prices, and the fact that all the services kept their own accounts. On the Nazi side of things, wild swings in allocation were frequent but the luftwaffe nearly always ended up with the lion's share of resources (especially scarce resources such as aluminium). As for the Army, only around 20% of their budget went into tanks. The production figures of all combatant nations reflect this: around two aircraft were produced for every tank.
 
 
^An outdated tank can still provide valuable frontline service, while an outdated fighter or bomber is dead weight.

There were many more fighter programs than tank programs, many of them producing dogs that never went into service. Of the ones that went into service, most were a disappointment in some way. Of the few that weren't, only one or two were outstanding. This gives you a good idea of the numbers involved: around 240 types used or tested, including foreign types, trainers, utility aircraft etc. Of those, maybe half were used in any great numbers in service. Of that 100-ish aircraft, perhaps two dozen rose above the level of mediocre. And of that two dozen, a handful are considered superlative in their class.
 
Aircraft design is very fiddly, and requires a mix of easily-ascertained factors (power-to-weight ratio, wing loading, armament etc.), hard-to-ascertain factors (top speed, turn times in various configurations, landing speeds) and factors which defied empirical modelling and could only be found by experiment (stability, stall characteristics, maintenance and service niggles, random engine/landing gear/aerodynamic bugs etc).
 
Making a good aircraft in WW2 was as much alchemy as science, and resulted in a lot of dead test pilots. Tanks were actually comparatively easier to design, and accordingly got designed by lesser talents on lower budgets (see, again, the example of British tank building in WW2, which was the product of a bare handful of second-tier engineers). Even today, the best mechanical engineers are mostly doing aviation and aerospace. 
 
 

some thoughts on 477A based on available info 

Inspired by Collimatrix's excellent topic in the Aviation section, my attempt at doing the same for tanks. 

Tank design is often represented as a trade-off between firepower, armour, and speed. But this ignores many other, equally important variables. Furthermore, this formula doesn't explain why the trade-offs are there in the first place. So here is my attempt to make things a bit more complicated.

The Constraint: Compact, powerful and reliable engines – and the ability to use them
Firepower and armour are the obvious features that made a 1940 tank obsolete in 1945. Yet even a 1945 tank is trivial compared to a WWI battleship. Or more modestly, the German 88mm, Soviet 85mm and US 90mm AA guns were prewar designs. Why not put them on a tank from the beginning? Were people just stupid back then?

Up to a point, I would say ‘yes’. While it is unrealistic to think of 1945 combat aircraft, radar, or nuclear weapons in 1940 as the result of anything short of time travel, 1940 tanks could have been significantly better without anachronistic scientific or engineering breakthroughs. Like the assault rifle, this really was a case where the right people just didn't see the need or spend the money.
 
However, it's not the only reason. A tank with a big gun and thick armour that can't move is just a pillbox. Like aircraft, WW2 tanks were fundamentally limited by their engine power. This is less obvious because additional power was typically used to ‘buy’ weight rather than speed. Yet the trend is clear. Shown below are the improvements in engine power for the German and British (cruiser) tank lines, which were in the war the longest.

German Panzers
I
100 hp
II
138 hp
III, IV
250-300 hp    
Tiger, Panther
690 hp

British Cruisers
I, II
150 hp 
III, IV, Crusader
340 hp (Liberty)
Cromwell, Comet
600 hp (Meteor)
 
Arguably, more powerful tank engines could and should have been introduced much earlier (the Liberty was first used in a tank as early as 1918).  I will leave that aside, noting only that, relative to aircraft engines, tank engines were forced to use lower octane fuel for economic reasons (preventing tank use of the Napier Lion), and are harder to cool due to being inside a slow moving armoured box (this was a particular challenge with the Merlin's conversion to the Meteor). 
 
There's also the choice of diesel (compression ignition) vs. petrol/gasoline (spark ignition) engines. Diesels had higher torque and lower fuel consumption, but lower specific power, were heavier and cost more, and meant an extra type of fuel in your logistics train. Both Germany and the US decided against diesels for fear sufficient fuel would not be available.

Once you have an engine, you still need to put power to the wheels through what the British call a ‘transmission’ and Americans call a ‘drivetrain’, which also does the steering since almost all tanks turn by making one track spin faster than the other. And you need a track that won't fall apart and a suspension that will stop the occupants falling apart. These were big problems during WW1 – the first tanks had no suspension at all! – and into the 1920s, but by the 1930s you could more or less use the power of the available engines. Even in 1945, however, the Panther and Comet were deliberately speed limited to around 30 mph.

TRADE-OFFS
OK, we have an engine of a given horsepower, and the ability to turn that horsepower into forward motion off-road with an acceptable degree of unreliability and discomfort. What choices do we have to make now?

1. Weight vs. mobility
This is almost self-explanatory, but mobility is more than speed. Very roughly, multiplying the hp/ton ratio by two gives an approximate top road speed in mph, although looking at individual types this correlation is surprisingly loose. The 15 mph of the British infantry tanks was annoyingly slow, the 25 mph of most German tanks seemed good enough, and as mentioned above, anything over 30 mph arguably wore out the running gear and the occupants to little benefit. A high power-weight ratio was also useful to provide rapid acceleration to dash from cover to cover.
 
But weight has other penalties that are less amenable to increased engine power:
Reliability and maintenance time – pushing around more weight means more parts everywhere from the engine to the suspension will break. (US tracks lasted about 6000km on light tanks but only 2400km on medium tanks. See Exercise Dracula for the effect of maintenance downtime on overall mobility.) Fuel consumption – less range for the individual tank, more for the logistics train to haul. Bridging – if you can’t cross a bridge without breaking it, you may have to go a much longer long way round. Shipping – the M6 heavy tank was not adopted partly because it exceeded the 40-ton limit on many dockyard cranes.
Tanks that were kept in service a long time such as T-34 and Panzers III and IV tended to creep up in weight as bigger guns and frontal armour were added, but for new designs bigger engines and better transmission, steering and track technology (and bridge building) roughly kept pace. Except when they didn't.

2. For a given weight: armour vs. internal volume 
The basic choice is a smaller box with thicker armour or a bigger box with thinner armour. Similarly, sloped armour will give more protection for a given weight, but reduces the internal volume. At the start of the war, most countries tried to armour the front, sides, and even rear to a similar standard, using mostly vertical armour.  As (anti-)tank guns got more powerful, this became impractical, and focus shifted to improving the front armour, both by increasing thickness and sloping (sloping all round reduced the volume of the tank excessively, as in the pyramid shaped early T-34s). 

3a. For a given volume:  guns vs. crew vs. ammo vs. suspension...
Everyone wants a bigger gun, but you need to fit other things in too. For example, a three-man turret crew (commander, gunner, loader) worked better than one or two men, because everyone could focus on one job. But when the British upgunned their Crusader and Valentine tanks from 2-pdr to 6-pdr guns, there was not enough room in the turret for the third man.

Of course, if you run out of ammo, or your crew are bumping into something every time they move, your tank will not fight very well either. (A bigger gun has a double penalty: it reduces the room for other things, including ammo, and also makes each round bigger. The IS-2 looks stunning on paper, but remember that 122mm gun only has 28 rounds and has a slower rate of fire due to its separate loading ammunition.) The Soviets limited the height of their tank crews for this reason. 

If you just want to shoot an enemy soldier or two, the main gun is overkill, so almost all tanks have a ‘coaxial’ machine gun next to it in the turret. Is it worth having a second machine gun in the hull and someone to shoot it? This was nearly universal during the war but fell out of fashion soon afterwards, as bigger guns needed more room for ammunition. (I also imagine most people trying to sneak up on a tank didn't do so from the front.) A few designs even had little secondary MG turrets, a hangover from prewar, but these were quickly abandoned.

Tank suspension is a whole topic of its own. Broadly the choice was between types that allowed more independent wheel movement for a better ride but took up valuable room inside the tank (and were harder to repair in the field) like Christie and torsion bar, and types that gave a worse ride but were completely external (and easier to repair) like VVSS/HVSS, leaf spring and Horstmann. Also, lots of small wheels are better to spread weight evenly and not sink into mud or snow, but fewer bigger wheels are better if you want to drive fast over bumps. The Germans tried to have the best of both worlds with many overlapping large wheels, which was complicated and tended to freeze solid in the Russian winter.

And obviously you need fuel, and a radio or two, a boiler for tea if you're British, compressed air tanks for cold weather starts if you're Russian, and other stuff I haven't mentioned or thought of...

3b. For a given volume: height vs. width
A taller tank is easier for the enemy to spot. A wider tank lets you have a bigger turret ring and therefore a bigger gun. So it seems like a low, wide tank is the ideal. But make your tank too wide and it can't fit on railways – the British were particularly constrained with a narrow railway loading gauge, but even the Germans had to put narrower tracks on their Tigers and Panthers to transport them by rail – or narrow roads and bridges.  Also, height allows more ground clearance to get over obstacles and greater gun depression to shoot at the enemy while hull down.

Finally, height can actually substitute for width to some extent in fitting a bigger gun: a tall hull as in the Sherman allows the turret ring to be extended over the tracks, or a tall turret as in the Challenger (and later Strv 74) allows the gun to recoil (and the crew to squeeze in) above the turret ring. 

Length tends to be the residual in the equation, within limits - too long and you can't steer, too short and the crew gets motion sickness. The Sherman was stretched as required to go from short radial to longer inline engines. Similarly the Challenger was basically a stretched Cromwell.

4. For a given sized turret/gun: AP vs. HE
Tanks sometimes shoot at enemy tanks, but mostly at other, softer things. If you need to punch through armour with AP rounds, you want a high velocity gun (penetration increases with roughly the square of the velocity, but only linearly in calibre). If you want to blow things up, it's all about calibre (HE capacity increases with the cube of calibre, or even a bit more when you consider the minimum size of the fuze and thickness of the shell wall). So for a gun that will fit in a given sized turret, you can have a smaller calibre high velocity hole puncher or a larger calibre, low velocity HE lobber. While you can build specialised guns for each job (and even different tanks to put them in, as the Germans did, which is going a bit far), it's better to have one kind of gun that can do both reasonably well in most of your tanks, since you never know what they will run into.

Conveniently, while tank armour increased throughout the war, common building materials and the human body stayed the same. Therefore, while AP rounds needed ever greater performance, HE didn't. Around 3 inch calibre, with increasing velocity as the war went on, proved a good compromise. The Americans and British both picked the medium velocity 75mm over the high velocity 6-pdr, as did the Soviets with the 76.2mm over their own 57mm AT gun. The higher velocity 76mm, 17-pdr and 77mm then gave the needed AP upgrade while the Soviets went for 85mm (probably because they already had the AA gun rather than any ideal calibre calculation). The Germans also ended up with high velocity 75mm guns on most of their late war tanks (except the 88s on the Tigers, again copied from the AA calibre).

5. For a given budget: quality vs. quantity
Obviously, a bigger tank uses more steel and other resources, and fancy gadgets like better radios, optics and steering systems have a cost. The Tiger was hugely expensive compared to the German mediums (and, more speculatively, other countries' tanks). The Panther was surprisingly cheap for its size, but partly by skimping on the final drive, which crueled its reliability. 

This trade-off applies to distribution as well as production. If you need to move your tanks across the ocean like the Americans, or even by rail across the steppe like the Germans and Soviets, a bigger and better tank at the factory gate meant fewer delivered to the battlefield for the same freight tonnage. So we are back where we started with weight vs. mobility, except in terms of numbers rather than the individual tank's capability.

As for what a 1990s tank would realistically look like, by the 1990s most tanks were really samey.
 
Powerplant:  The earliest tanks with diesels were experimented with in the 1930s, I believe either the Japanese or the Soviets were the first.  By the 1940s the advantages were obvious, but de-rated aviation gasoline engines were reliable and already in mass production, so many countries stuck with those.  I'm less clear on the rationale for the Germans keeping gasoline motors as theirs were not aeroderivative.  In any case, there actually was a German tank diesel program, it just went nowhere.

By the 1990s there were pretty much two realistic possibilities for a tank powerplant; either a turbodiesel or a gas turbine.  1990s MBTs are about half armor by weight, so they're very sensitive to the compactness of things.  Turbocharged diesels don't have amazing power density, although with a lot of careful engineering they can be made competitive, but they have very low fuel consumption and lower waste heat rejection requirements than gasoline engines.  Once you factor in the volume of the engine plus the volume of the fuel plus the volume of the cooling fans, and the strategic mobility advantage the fuel-sipping diesel, it's definitely coming out ahead of the gasoline motor.

Gas turbines do not scale down particularly well.  Very large gas turbines like the 33,000 horsepower Rolls Royce WR-21 naval gas turbine in the Type 45 destroyer achieve 42% thermal efficiency, which is like middling efficiency by diesel standards.  A gas turbine that will fit inside of a tank is much less efficient; realistically about a match for a gasoline engine in terms of specific fuel consumption when it's at design point and much worse if it's idling or doing any kind of stop and go.  Gas turbines also need beefier air filters than diesels due to much higher mass airflow through the engine.  However, there are still a number of advantages that must be taken into consideration.  Gas turbines are (very nearly) completely self-cooling, so while there will still need to be cooling fans to keep the transmission cool, the total powerpack losses to cooling power will be smaller and the ballistic windows from the ventilation will be much smaller.  Gas turbines with a free power turbine (which is most of them) have a very different torque/RPM characteristics from a diesel; they produce max torque at their lowest RPM and max power at their minimum torque.  These are very favorable characteristics if you want to keep the transmission small (although the Abrams' XR-1100 transmission was, as I understand, designed to work with both the AVCR-1360 and AGT-1500 so it likely does not take much advantage of this effect).  Gas turbines are easier to start in the cold.  Gas turbines have very little vibration because their moving parts rotate rather than reciprocate.  Gas turbines are actually multi-fuel, no questions asked and no mucking around with adjusting the engine to suit the fuel.  The Brayton cycle uses continuous, constant-pressure ignition which simply does not care about octane numbers or cetane numbers.  Finally, it's easier to design gas turbine fuel burners so they produce very little smoke than it is to ensure that a diesel produces very little smoke due to the much different fuel burn stoichiometry of a gas turbine.  It should be noted that not all gas turbine designers have actually succeeded in doing so, however.

A gas turbine good enough for a tank would be roughly similar to a turboshaft for a helicopter, albeit tweaked more for better fuel consumption than for absolute power to weight ratio.  The list of countries that can design very good turboshaft engines is quite short, but then so is the list of countries that can make high specific power diesels.  If tank-sized gas turbines performed as well as ship-sized ones this would be no contest, but they don't so either choice is competitive and it's pretty ambiguous which is "best".  But most countries in the world realistically do not have the luxury to pick and choose between a top of the line diesel and a top of the line turbine.  Interestingly, the UK is in a position to make such a choice and they still managed to fuck it up somehow by fielding a tank diesel that's 300 horsepower short of its stablemates.  The French hyperbar engine is a turbocharged diesel, just tweaked for very fast throttle response and compactness at some expense to efficiency.

Armament:  By the 1990s, advances in digital fire control systems largely rendered gun-launched missiles obsolete.  There was probably still a case for them as a sort of long-range precision round for swatting at helicopters and the like, but that role could also be filled with something like M830A1.  There were various flirtations in the mid Cold War era with sorta-kinda howitzer like armament for tanks in the form of medium pressure guns and gun/launcher hybrids, but by the late 1970s there was basically a consensus amongst all sensible people that the tank armament of the future would either be the Rheinmetall 120mm or would look a lot like it.  Even British engineers were aware of this:



In any event, the Soviets taking their toys and going home meant that the world did not suddenly fill with various super-tanks, and tank lethality ended up being more economically improved by advances in ammunition design rather than arming the tanks with larger guns.



You can't go too much larger than current 120mm without requiring an autoloader.

Navy Unveils Next-Generation DDG(X) Warship Concept with Hypersonic Missiles, Lasers
Source: https://news.usni.org/2022/01/12/navy-unveils-next-generation-ddgx-warship-concept-with-hypersonic-missiles-lasers

 
"Notionally, the new ship could power up to 600-kilowatt lasers that would be powerful enough to interdict hostile guided missiles."
 
"The current DDG-51s field 96 MK-41 VLS cells and USNI News understands that Navy requirements keep the VLS cells for DDG(X) about the same."
 
"The SPY-6 air search radar could expand from a 14-foot aperture to an 18-foot aperture that would increase the sensitivity of the sensor. The Navy is also planning for a modular payload space for different future missions."

Elements of Tank Design (Page 35)
 
https://www.benning.army.mil/armor/eARMOR/content/issues/1983/NOV_DEC/ArmorNovemberDecember1983Web.pdf

This video shows what appears to be a 3D CAD of the French Model 1897 artillery piece.  It shows how the mechanisms on the cannon work.  The channel has torpedoes and other arms as well.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tW4GRWhue4

This video shows what appears to be a 3D CAD of the French Model 1897 artillery piece.  It shows how the mechanisms on the cannon work.  The channel has torpedoes and other arms as well.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tW4GRWhue4

Elements of Tank Design (Page 35)
 
https://www.benning.army.mil/armor/eARMOR/content/issues/1983/NOV_DEC/ArmorNovemberDecember1983Web.pdf

ya its fiction, but its not worth mocking 

Ive read it twice dude, its a great book, i dont know where you get off calling it fiction. It manages to accurately be a military tech thriller while conveying a human side that many military authors forget to outside of grizzled top secret CIA man 54535362. 

I read that, it was pretty cool. The only book to accurately describe what WW3 would actually be.

https://www.2951clss-gulfwar.com/db/a10gulfwar/battle_damaged_a_10_report_report.php
 
https://www.2951clss-gulfwar.com/loses.htm

Mythbusting about F-104 Starfighter fighter losses and capabilities.
Overview of the evolution of flight safety for fighter jets.
 
ps. I used my own voice because the community voted on this option.
 
 

As for the gull wings, here’s something explaining its aerodynamics: 
 
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/21027/whats-the-advantage-of-the-f4u-corsairs-gull-wing-design

I think the way to "win" this contest is to develop the most expensive platform possible that sits in the heart of the trashfire envelope.  Make it more expensive by giving it armor and hardening the airframe.  Make it more expensive by equipping it with a cannon that cannot take out tanks, the purported target of the platform.  Upgrade the platform with systems that let it "standoff" even though the platform is aerodynamically constrained to be in or near the trashfire envelope always.  Also, make sure the platform is optimized for CAS instead of the more efficient BAI.  Then put out to the media how the platform can take hits from trashfire that could not even reach other platforms.  Declare that CAS must be performed in the trashfire envelope instead of outside it.  Therefore, the platform in question is "superior" at CAS compared to platforms optimized for BAI/interdiction/strategic.

There is a myth I've seen online and had plenty of arguments about.  The myth says that Beatty was a superior admiral to Jellicoe.  Absurd to anyone in the know but it persists.  I believe it persists because some people see their own personality in Beatty and therefore stick up for him.
 
Where to start?  Jellicoe was involved in the building up of the technical side of the RN in WW1.  He knew that the RN AP shells did not work and that he had a powerful but flawed instrument under him.  Jellicoe knew that the RN was doing as much as it could against the Central Powers with blockade and amphibious warfare and that destroying the German fleet won the Allies nothing.  At Jutland Jellicoe had 0 scouting data from Beatty and therefore had to make decisions based upon instinct, hunches, and reasoning about what effect his choices would have given what the enemy might be doing.  He chose right and crossed the T, letting his superior weight of shell tell.
 
Beatty did not fire his signals officer for personal reasons, costing him battles given the fact that his flagship could not give orders in battle.  At Jutland he went charging after the enemy, leaving the 4 most powerful ships in the world behind due to the lower speed of those ships (Queen Elizabeth class) and once again, poor signals.  The magnitude of this error is clear when one realizes that Hipper had 5 ships to Beatty's 6.  Beatty could have had 10, 4 with 15 inch guns, had he wanted them.  Instead he left them behind.  Beatty's main task was to inform Jellicoe of German positions which he did not do.
 
I'm not sure why this is even a myth but I wanted to help bust it here.
 
The best book I've read on WW1 naval combat is Robert K Massie's Castles of Steel.  Very entertaining as well as informative.
 
 
Trigger warning:  I really hate link rot so I spammed this paper on Jutland.
 
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-229X.12241
 
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303546167_Weight_of_Shell_Must_Tell_A_Lanchestrian_Reappraisal_of_the_Battle_of_Jutland
 
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Weight-of-Shell-Must-Tell%3A-A-Lanchestrian-of-the-of-MacKay-Price/af53aec74cccb3a10eac3489aa233dfc9b247cea
 
https://pure.york.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/weight-of-shell-must-tell(186a432d-44bc-4f9b-8ee5-6f6245e1ad44)/export.html
 
https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/99759/1/Jutland.PreReview.pdf