Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Deal on Sixteen Inch Gun Barrels!

That's not sixteen inches long, it's sixteen inches interior diameter...

3 comments:

NotClauswitz said...

Reading in a recent Naval History Magazine about a WWII battleship battle betweeen the US and the Japanese - it was night, ships were damaged, and the US shells in some cases landed short - but with deflection set so low they acted like gigantic long-lance torpedos, sinking the enemy ships. The Battle off Samar?

Drang said...

Not exactly: During the Battle Off Samar, the US Navy's forces were DDs and DDEs, and escort ("jeep") carriers--Samar was part of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the Japanese Navy suckered Halsey into sending his main force off after the decoy forces, and TF3 was left holding the bag...
However, the 5 inchers of the DDs and DDEs did, in fact, find some weak points on the Jap ships, and the Japs never had anything like the US fire direction computers--they couldn't fire while maneuvering, for example.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_off_Samar

NotClauswitz said...

Yeh that acction map looked wrong compared to the one in the article, Naval History lags a couple months before posting content - the attribution for sinking the Jap battleship is a very recent discovery of cables and some signals intelligenc that popped-up - too bad I didn''t keep the magazine... I recall the name Oldendorf, may have been Surigao Strait - the japs thought it was torpedos that sunk them but others say it was the torpedo-like action of shots that fell short. I think one of our ships' radar control was out and they fired the old fashioned way.