Iowa vs Vanguard

[Shipwreck]

Wiki has a simplified animated gif showing the loading sequence of a British 15"/42 Mark I :



The KGVs and HMS Vanguard had the arrangement reversed, i.e. magazine (#4 in the wiki gif) below the shell room (#2 in the wiki gif).

[Dreadnought]

Next time you go to your favorite video club, try to rent the 1960 movie "Sink the Bismarck". The loading of the 15" guns was shot on HMS Vanguard

I must have seen that movie atleast 10 times. I didnt know the gunnery footage was shot onboard Vanguard.

[zraver]

That's why the British "R" class deliberately sacrificed stability.

Uhmm.... R class being the sub (doubtful), Revenge or Renown?

It means the ship and its FC systems were capable of precise fire under terrible conditions. The British outshot the Germans. I cited this event in response to the claim that RN gunnery was unimpressive. DoY's performance (not to mention Norfolk's) was impressive.

Impressive compared to what how ever? Granted the North Sea is not nearly as calm as a strait, and radar is better than the mk 1 eyeball. But.... if rough seas are the reason the DoY had to close to cruiser ranges, why didn't the Norfolk have to close shorter ranges? The American's were scoring from farther away and more often

[Tiornu]

R class being the sub (doubtful), Revenge or Renown?

The "R" class (officially the Revenge class, popularly the Royal Sovereign class) consisted of five battleships built just after the famous Queen Elizabeth class. Ironically, the decreased stability that was a key feature of the design actually caused it to become obsolete more quickly because the process of inter-war modernization included the addition of deck armor, a significant increase in topweight. Because the R's were already skimpy on stability, they were harder to upgrade. The RN chose to spend its money on the QE's instead, and the R's got little attention.

Impressive compared to what how ever?

Compared to the German gunnery.

Granted the North Sea is not nearly as calm as a strait, and radar is better than the mk 1 eyeball. But.... if rough seas are the reason the DoY had to close to cruiser ranges, why didn't the Norfolk have to close shorter ranges?

The battle was not in the North Sea but in the Arctic, just after the winter solstice. I guess you could say, it was a dark and stormy night. Short range was dictated by visibility, just as visibility dictated the short range of Washington's fire against Kirishima.
There's not much we can learn in attempting a comparison with Surigao Strait, almost a year later with newer radar and a pleasant shooting-gallery setting. One advantage West Virginia had over DoY was her RPC. DoY suffered during the protracted fight for her crew's having to follow the pointer. This caused salvoes to drift off-target in deflection. This probably influenced the decision to provide RPC for Vanguard's turret bearing.

[clyder]

I'll have to double check, but the Iron duke had a beam of 90' the Baden was 8' wider, the Konig Albert was 5 1/2 feet wider. I don't know how far apart the range finder was for each ship. But a the very least, would not wider equal better stability? I could swear the German ships had bigger and more accurate range finders


The Hood's range finder was 30' on a beam of 104'

For optical rangefinders the key issue is the baseline of the stereo pair. Other things being equal, the uncertainty in range measurement is inversely proportional to the baseline. If I recall the UK ones in WWI made by Barr and Stroud were only about 11 foot for one model, and 8 foot for another. The German ones were considerably larger.

But the beam of the ships had nothing to do with it, since on all ships the rangefinders were much narrower than the beam.

[clyder]

Didnt mean to suggest that.



Shipwreck, you wouldnt happen to have any footage/images of KGV's gun loading sequence would you? I'm attempting to describe the "cage" method for the RN BB's.

There are some such videos out. I hired one from the library a couple of years back.