I really find it funny how some people in this comment section are talking about how unrealistic it is that they are not moving ships and the flak is too low. Guys, this video was meant to demonstrate the power of the 12,000 lb bomb against ships. This wasn’t meant to simulate a battle.
The "Cookie" was a thin walled blast bomb used to flatten large areas of buildings. The Earthquake bombs of 12000lbs were used to sink the Tirpitz, the 22.000lb used to topple the Bielefeld viaduct. These were supersonic, deep penetration bombs, which would have easily destroyed a capital ship.
Agree. Especially from a level bomber. But I do think if you got within 75-100 feet of it you would do some serious damage just from the pressure wave hitting the side of the ship.@@PxThucydides
Problem: It is VERY DIFFICULT to hit a precise target (especially if it is maneuvering) without a guidance system for the bomb.That goes double from high altitude.
Without a guidance system, forget it. The Tirpitz was anchored and not moving and it took several missions to sink it, until getting a direct hit on a non moving target
Most ships were damaged intentionally out at sea to get them to port if the submarines or other nearby ships couldn't finish them off. Port Strike was the primary way to get a ship written off. Level bombers created havoc for ships at most. Torpedo Bombers and Dive Bombers were the way to hit ships out at sea.
No kidding, I would say IMPOSSIBLE. Plus, those ships in the video aren't even moving (sitting ducks). So it becomes yet more difficult if they are taking evasive action. But fun to watch
Interesting thing about all of those direct hits from a high altitude bunker buster is that none of the ships was split in half or capsized. With this much speed and payload, a 6 ton bomb would punch through at least 3 decks if not more and discharge near the keel which would split the ship in half. Another scenario would be igniting main magazines and resulting splitting the hull. Somehow this simulation is very formulated...
This bomb can't, because it isn't a Tallboy, it's just a standard Bomber Command 12000-lb high capacity "Blockbuster". These were designed to maximize blast, and were used to blow the roofs off of buildings, allowing 2-lb. incendiary sticks to penetrate deep into the interior, burning out the building.
War Thunder doesnt support all those fancy animations and mechanics on large ships, also it doesnt need to be an AP bomb to turn a ship into a million pieces
I just wonder why the captain did not take evasive actions. As the bomber is known on its bomb run, evasive actions would at least minimize a direct hit.
@@aurorathearcticwolf4243 If it is an armored ship, like a battleship, it pretty much does. A light case bomb, like a 12,000-lb blockbuster, is impact fuzed, so it goes off on contact with the first solid thing it encounters--like the superstructure of a ship, or its upper deck. The explosion creates a blast wave and minimal fragmentation, which will rip up deckhouses, masts, exposed gun mounts, and so on. The shock effect might be transmitted through the hull, and dismount machinery and fixtures below deck; it can also start fires. But the ship's horizontal (deck) armor will protect its vitals--the machinery compartments, the magazines, and the turrets. Usually, horizontal armor schemes consist of two decks: a main deck, intended to stop the projectile from penetrating; and a thinner splinter deck, intended to catch any fragments, should the projectile actually penetrate the main deck. Sometimes the thinner deck is placed above the main deck, to initiate the fuze of an armor piercing projectile, which will then explode before penetrating the main armored deck. But, either way, unless the projectile penetrates the vitals, damage to the ship will be structurally superficial, but may result in a mission kill by disabling the fire control sensors.
Hitting a fast battleship from medium altitude is nearly impossible as a ship at 27kt+ can maneuver just enough in the 30 sec a free fall bomb dropped from 15k ft. However, a large bomb, mostly explosive, no armor piercing case, all weight in charge, should hit water near, set to detonate say about 100 ft should cause enough turbulence to damage the propeller shaft, forcing reduced speed to the point that it can be hit
The main problem is that Midway and Guadalcanal proved very decisively that high-level bombing didn't work. If you wanted to use land based bombers it was found B-25 or like type medium bomber flying at mast height and skipping bombs across the water was the only way to hit shipping. Had the target been moving there's next to no way you could have hit it at a safe altitude
Yes, that is true. However, if a 12,000 pound bomb just does a near miss, it will buckle the hull and may even have an effect on the keel. Though I think even getting a near miss from high altitude would be a stroke of luck.
Blockbuster bombs were used in air raids against Germany in WW2, but they can also use to destroy mighty warships when it dropped from a four-engined Avro Lancaster bombers.
The Iowa class battleships could reach 34 knots and wound engage in evasive maneuvers. It’s one thing to drop a bomb from a Lancaster on a moored ship and quite another on one weaving around at flank speed.
Likelihood of hitting a moving, maneuvering ship from that kind of altitude with a single bomb approaches that of hitting the lotto successfully 3 times in a row, IMO.
@@simonbarber5440 I think if the war had carried on for longer than it did, eventually even the 22,000lbs earthquakers would have been equipped with some form of controlled guidance, either radio or even tv cameras. A lot of the 'modern' ordnance was well under development by the end of WW2. Only strange thing is why is a British bomber dropping a bloody big bomb on a British warship!😃
In the real world, a 12,000-lb high capacity bomb would explode on contact with the battleship. The resulting blast, would cause extensive superstructure damage and kill or wound any personnel on deck. As the bomb was designed to maximize blast effect, it has no penetrative capability; it cannot be fitted with a delay time fuze, because the casing is very thin, and would break open if it hit anything solid (like a steel deck house. The bomb would, therefore, never penetrate the upper deck, let alone the armored deck, the conning tower or the main turret roof. Most of the ship's fire control positions--the forward and after director towers, and secondary range finders mounted in the turrets--would be disabled, which would render the ship combat ineffective, but the vitals would be intact, and the ship could sail back to base under its own power.
You confuse the 12,000-lb high case, with the Barnes Wallis Tallboy, which WAS a deep penetration bomb. This was used to destroy the German battleship Tirpitz; however, that ship was at anchor. The odds of hitting a moving vessel with any free fall bomb from an altitude of 20,000 feet are slim to nil. If, by some odd chance, you did hit it, the bomb would, most likely, pass through the ship and explode beneath the keel, causing serious, probably fatal, damage. A hit on a turret would likely result in a magazine explosion.
@@StuartKoehl Thanks for your comment. I understand about this. The concept of this video is actually about how 12000lb bombs work in WarThunder against battleships. If the battleship moves and avoids it, the content will be uninteresting, and the destructive power of the bomb cannot be verified. Also, the armor piercing mechanics are inadequate in the game at this stage, and thin-shelled conventional bombs are more powerful than they actually are.
@Stuart Koehl The Germans has success with the guided bomb "Fritz X" sinking the Italian Battleship "Roma", almost sinking HMS Warspite, the Italian Battleship "Italia", the US cruiser "USS Savannah", the RN cruiser "HMS Uganda" and possibly 2 US merchantnan. It weighed approx 1600 kg.
@@cliveburt2638 It also almost sank the light cruiser USS Savannah, with a direct hit on the roof of B Turret. The bomb, fortunately, blew out the bottom of the ship, flooding the magazine before it could explode. Fritz-X was built around a 1000-kg (2205-lb.) armor piercing bomb. Released from an altitude of 20,000 feet (which put it above most shipboard anti-aircraft fire), it could achieve transsonic velocity at impact. When it hit the Roma, the bomb penetrated through both protective decks and exploded in the engine room, starting a fire which transmitted to the forward main battery magazine, destroying the ship. To destroy a heavily armored ship with a bomb required two things: a bomb of sufficient weight, and a high impact velocity. Dive bombers, releasing their bombs at 1500 feet, had the accuracy to hit a moving ship, but their bombs, generally weighing 500-1000 lbs., did not have the velocity to penetrate the protective decks of modern battleships (older ships were another story). When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, their solution to destroying the battleships moored inboard on Battleship Row was to convert 1600-lb, 16-inch armor-piercing projectiles from the battleships Nagato and Mutsu into armor piercing bombs to be dropped from Nakajima B5N "Kate" carrier attack aircraft flying at 15,000 feet. That gave the projectile the velocity it needed to penetrate deck armor, and since the ships were stationary and moored close together, the probability of scoring a hit was high. One of these bombs hit the USS Arizona abreast B-turret and detonated her forward magazines, obliterating the forward part of the ship and sinking it almost instantly.
“Enemy battleship sunk!” (US) “feindliches Schlachtschiff versenkt” (German) “вражеский линкор затонул!” (Russian) “We sank an enemy Battelship!” (British) “敵戦艦沈没!” (Japanese) “affondata la corazzata nemica!” (Italian) Note: these were copied from google translate so might not be accurate, apologies if they aren’t!
imagine telling an officer in the 1940's that eighty years in the future we use complex, photorealistic computer simulations of the most powerful contemporary ships in the world being destroyed by precision bombing for entertainment purposes
Lesson to be learned, in war you stand still you die. If those ships were at full speed and manouvering, they would have avoided such an high altitude drop
Just a couple of questions why wasn't the Iowa, Bismarck and Yamato not part of this video and how come there were cruisers and Battlecruisers in it when it is a video about battleships?
艦船のように動いている標的だと命中どころか至近着弾さえ難しいのでは。とはいえ、実戦例↓にあるような空中爆発だったら、少なくとも艦上の構造物には相当のダメージを与えて、戦闘不能に陥らせることができそう。以下、Wikipedia(en)より。 617 Squadron developed a technique of dropping a 1,000lb MC bomb just before a 12,000lb HC bomb; the shock wave from the 1,000lb explosion fired the pistols on the 12,000lb bomb to give an "air burst";
The Billy Mitchell problem surfaces again. A high level gravity bomb against a STATIONARY ship. Why isn`t the ship manuvering? Probably becaise it would take a lot of bombs to hit the ship!
12,000lb was Tallboy. 5k lb was a Cookie, 20k lb was a Grand Slam. Tirpitz got hit/near missed by multiple Tallboys. Cookies were very different from Tallboys, the former were 5,000lb incendiary bombs, the latter were 12,000lb Deep Penetration bombs. Very, very different.
Not sure why this seems to be so confusing for people. You can have bombs of the same weights, with different purposes. The most well known 12000lb bomb is the deep-penetrating "bunker-busting" Tallboy (the kind that was used to sink Tirpitz), but that's not the 12,000lb bomb in this video. The one in the video is the 12000lb HC, which blows up on impact and has a much larger explosive yield.
you'd need Tallboy or Grand Slam instead............with a quick fuse, but very hard to hit a ship at 30 knots, but a near miss will still sink it...... you'd need to release the bomb maybe 3 hull lengths ahead of the ship
This just shows how the battleship anti aircraft fire power never kept up with bomber development. Aim and shoot and hope for a hit...now there are rockets guided by tracking radars. No need for huge battleships anymore.
A non-armor piercing 6 ton bomb like that would destroy all the anti-aircraft guns, boats, aircraft, much of the fire control but wouldn’t sink a capital ship. Try some Tallboys instead… sinking capital ships and bunker busting is what they were for!
