Can we do a breakdown of the Best Battleship site?

[Jeeps_Guns_Tanks]

http://www.combinedfleet.com/baddest.htm

 

This site is a true classic of the internet, with a lot of interesting info if you dig around. I see others claim that the site is wrong, and that the Yamato should score better. I don't buy this, but would love to see a breakdown on how the site is wrong.

[Sturgeon]

Went ahead and stickied the page.

[Jeeps_Guns_Tanks]

Has X registered yet?

[LostCosmonaut]

Has X registered yet?

 

I don't think so.

[xthetenth]

Hiiiiiiiiiii.

 

It's got a lot of good information, but it glosses over things where the author didn't have great information (iirc, the Yamato actually had pretty fantastic accuracy with optics, so with the right light and not at night she could probably make it more interesting than the numbers indicate, and until post-war refits, the Richelieus couldn't shoot accurately at all). It's great for a quick datamine or summary uses but I wouldn't treat it as the word of god. Okun's work that the armor numbers are based on is fantastic and definitely worth a slog, but I'm not 100% sure how well it scales up since the Iowa and SoDak's numbers rely on decapping effects.

 

Shortest summary is that there's a bunch of good numbers but there's a lot of places where numbers indicate gulfs in capabilities that won't necessarily be there in all circumstances and/or represent an optimally fought ship with the benefit of hindsight, where a ship fought perfectly without that benefit might fare considerably worse. Some of it is the constraints of discussing a bunch of ships where some don't have that documentation available, some didn't survive to see the trim the rest are being compared to (VV pays for this in her AA numbers), and some left their home port less than half a month after first seeing the water (Richelieu doesn't pay badly for this).

 

I'll possibly clean this up when I'm not playing vidya games an hour or two before I go pass out (read tomorrow).

 

EDIT: haha not if I had to stay late at work gettin' mad at IDE bugs. It's gonna be the weekend most likely, and that's if I manage to turn up half-remembered stuff in decent time, otherwise it might not be too much more. The short of the thing is pay attention to the information he has and doesn't have, and what conditions the glossed over bits would be really relevant.

[Collimatrix]

Somewhat related, this interesting tidbit from Ken Estes:

 

 

 

Exactly, the USN 1944 AA instructions against the Kamikaze were for the BBs to hold steady and fire away, and for DD and CL/CA to maneuver to avoid impact, even though their AAA accuracy would suffer.

 

 

So by late WWII, BBs were essentially gigantic AAA platforms for protecting carriers.

The carriers filled to the brim with the same airplanes that had made the BBs obsolete in the first place.

Funny how that works.

 

This suggests that a higher weight for AA weapons systems performance might be in order.

[Donward]

Post December 7, if I had a choice of where to be stationed on a Navy ship, it would certainly be on a battleship.

AA platforms, shore bombardment, warm cots and cold ice cream.. Not a bad gig.

[Tied]

No gig compares to the tail gunner of a Tu-95

[xthetenth]

So by late WWII, BBs were essentially gigantic AAA platforms for protecting carriers.

The carriers filled to the brim with the same airplanes that had made the BBs obsolete in the first place.

Funny how that works.

 

This suggests that a higher weight for AA weapons systems performance might be in order.

 

Regarding AA effectiveness, I'd love to find the SoDak's action reports again.

 

It is worth remembering that the Pacific Theater wasn't the only naval combat going, and without competent naval strike aviation (itself not a trivial task in the slightest, especially if you want to stuff it into a ship) battleships' combat power was a real and useful thing.

 

As always, the context makes a huge difference for how units fit into the combined arms system as a whole.

 

Also, an interesting thing I intend to read at some point: http://www.researcheratlarge.com/Ships/BB57/1942DamageReport/GuadalcanalDamageRpt.html

[Donward]

Neat stuff. The electrical failure do to the shock of being struck by shells on the South Dakota isn't something that one normally thinks about. Usually it is shells blowing holes through stuff, blowing up powder and sinking that gets all the attention.

[xthetenth]

Neat stuff. The electrical failure do to the shock of being struck by shells on the South Dakota isn't something that one normally thinks about. Usually it is shells blowing holes through stuff, blowing up powder and sinking that gets all the attention.

 

It's kind of funny, because the I-26's hit on Saratoga is used to crap on turbo-electric propulsion because it just so happened to be in the right place to knock out the bus and take her propulsion down for a while. Turbo-electric drive was pretty cool in some big ways, and the downside of weight was a bit bad but it was low in the ship. The right sort of fluke hit can make a big change and I'd much rather the fluke that left Saratoga without power for a few minutes and have four times as much compartmentalization aft if I take a hit to the shafts like Prince of Wales.

 

(I'm generally a fan of turbo-electric drive in ships, and tend to agree with this article)

 

There's also some examples of ships getting systems knocked out that are really notable, such as Bismarck getting shot to an unfightable hulk that resembled a warship only as much as a Viking funeral pyre.

[Jeeps_Guns_Tanks]

Regarding AA effectiveness, I'd love to find the SoDak's action reports again.

 

It is worth remembering that the Pacific Theater wasn't the only naval combat going, and without competent naval strike aviation (itself not a trivial task in the slightest, especially if you want to stuff it into a ship) battleships' combat power was a real and useful thing.

 

As always, the context makes a huge difference for how units fit into the combined arms system as a whole.

 

Also, an interesting thing I intend to read at some point: http://www.researcheratlarge.com/Ships/BB57/1942DamageReport/GuadalcanalDamageRpt.html

 

Very nice find.

[xthetenth]

Regarding AA effectiveness, I'd love to find the SoDak's action reports again.

 

http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/rep/Kamikaze/AAA-Summary-1045/#I

 

This is a good breakdown of AA effectiveness by type in a few different ways.