Ship vs Ship, 1 vs 1 - Why you don't see them here 

Pinned post for Q&A :)

Capital ship fleet management for beginners: They're moving in herds.... they *do* move in herds.

Someone: asking Drach a ship vs ship question Drach: throwing his binoculars

Now I want to see an April fool's video where drach does a 1v1 ignoring all of this and just treating the exercise like he's five.

Hard factors include: Is Warspite sailing with your convoy? If yes, then chances of victory go up 2000 percent

I’m sure this has been mentioned elsewhere, but I would personally opine that there is exactly one scenario where a 1v1 comparison makes sense: Comparing prospective designs a navy was considering building or buying. It would be rather interesting to see why navies chose what they chose and what your thoughts on their choice. This is of course comes with the caveat that there’s still plenty of other matters like build time and location, cost, and geopolitical relations.

"Your question is pointless, stop asking." Drach Roflmao I love it. I'm so glad I found this channel.

Drach! According to all you've just said, there actually IS a perfect scenario for a fair 1 vs 1 comparison. We are proud to introduce: a ramming bout between two galleys with well fed crews!

I feel like Drachinifel snapped from so many people asking 1v1. Then he created this nearly hour long video explaining why he doesn't do 1v1. LoL

Drach, I just took a sip of Coke when you said, "...until the cows come home and well after they've been turned into burgers...". I prefer drinking Coke to shoving it up my sinuses.

"But in terms of soft factors, you know, Warspite appears to be a case of actual living plot armor." I just lost it. "Hey, Fritz! Nice try!"

I think a lot of people forget that battles in war are more like street fights than they are a sanctioned boxing match.

An important soft factor to be considered for HMS New Zealand is whether or not the captain is wearing his grass skirt and tiki.

Take heart Drach. Nobody on their deathbed ever wished that they had spent more time arguing with strangers on the internet so don't waste your time on haters. No matter how satisfying it might be to prove them wrong it still would not change their minds

The last 10 minutes is basically, Drach pointing out that Million to one shots seem to happen 9 times out of 10

Hey Drach, would you consider doing more videos on ships of the line? I'd love to see an extended one on the L'Ocean class of french line ships. Your video on the american ships of the line was probably one of the most informative I've seen, not only on the specific ships, but on the design, construction and operation of ships of the line in general. Maybe a series of videos on the evolution of ships during the age of sail, from the late medieval ships like the cog to the caravels, carracks and galleons, finally ending in the indiamen, pinnaces, brigantines, fluyts/flyboats, frigates and line ships that dominated the late age of sail till the XIX century.

Hey Drac, if the _Vasa_ hadn't sank within half an hour of being launched and instead had been outfitted with antigravity engines and a fusion-powered plasma cannon, could it have sunk the _Bismarck?_ (Of course not, cuz the _Bismarck_ was the BEST SHIP EVAR.)

Another fun detail of Bismarck vs Iowa, other than Bismarck having been sunk 2 years before Iowa was commissioned, was that the USA and Germany were not at war with each other when Bismarck sank.

Drach, we both know that if admiral Lee is in command of your BB, no 1v1 can be a fair fight. Also if your ship mascot is unsinkable Sam your ship is doomed.

Essentially an hour of Drachinifel ranting, I love it 🙂

I think a great example is HMS Shannon who actually had a 1v1 fight in 1812, her armament and the performance of her sister ship HMS Guerriere, would show she should lose to Chesapeake, but not just did she win, she won so decisively, you'd need 4 chessapeake's too have the same number of cannon balls hitting Shannon as hit Chessapeake. This doesn't even go into the tactics and the way the Shannon had a cannon at the bow specifically placed their to act like a giant sniper rifle taking out the cheesapeakes helmsmen and wheel, this wasn't a particularly normal tactic, but won them the battle. Another example is HMS Speedy Vs El Gamo 14 guns vs 32 guns of bigger calibre, yet Speedy won. The idea of doing a 1v1 based on specs does not show training or how ships are set up differently, the accuracy or preferred tactics, it doesn't examine the captains. Or as you said when, where and why they are fighting which create 100s of different results.

So, what would happen if: Nelson's flagship Victory (if it was made of iron and had engines) fought Dreadnought (if it was made of wood and used sails)?

Been waiting for this. Personally, I would much rather learn about naval history than some time and space defying what if scenarios. 👍

Reason 7. It's essentially irrelevant. As you've said, ships are rarely alone but a lot of ships, whilst ostensibly the same type, aren't actually that comparable. British battleships of WW1 and the inter-war period were not built for single-ship combat but were built to patrol and control an empire and in most circumstances if they did get into a skirmish, would not be fighting ships of an equivalent class. It's a bit like the idea of tank vs. tank combat. People get very hung up on the idea of an M4 Sherman facing down a Tiger but it was incredibly rare and the vast majority of the time, the tanks are being used as armoured field artillery and infantry support. In those circumstances any tank is better than no tank - so M4 Shermans weren't really built and optimised for tank vs. tank combat and even when the Tiger was in service (however small the numbers) it didn't play into the heads of tank designers that this would even be a particularly important consideration.

As a 40+ year veteran Mechanical Engineer, If you get into an argument with physics, you will lose 100% of the time, and it usually hurts.

I wonder who would win a 'rant off' between Drach and Dr Clarke. I used to think it would be Dr Clarke but Drach seems to have an untapped reserve of 'rant' just ready to be unleashed.

I appreciate that this channel doesn't deal with 1v1 ship comparisons. The nuance is what keeps it interesting.

This is the most Rozhestvensky I've heard Drach in a long time. Also, this is the "Dicta Drachinifel" for those diving into naval history. Sterling content, mate. Well done.

An issue I feel causes problems is misapplied scientific thinking. I think the assumption is that if you get ships in a 1 vs 1 you will eliminate all random variables and somehow work out their true, factual superiority/inferiority. The idea is more like a lab experiment seeking to eliminate all outside factors with the dependent and independent variables being singularly focus on. That can't happen. Warships are not variables within something (unless the focus would be upon the strategic aspect of a war and their place in it), they are systems more like living beings. You take them out of their natural habitat and you won't get their true behaviour, you'll get their behavior reacting to artificial conditons. I've heard many species of spider don't actually eat their mates after reproducing, that behavior is only observed in lab conditions because the females are stressed by the different conditons and do it similar to how mothers animals will kill and eat their babies as well. I don't know how accurate that is, but as an applicable example here it will do. Oh, and for a warship: you cannot seriously have covered the French hotel battleships and still not have done Hoche yet!? Really? Get on it!

I would also add in that even if you were to insist on an unrealistic "NPC generic crew", how do you define what a "generic" crew of a ship is? Even if you were to assume both ships are crewed by completely identical human-like robots, do you account for various navies having different levels of experience, historical performance, or as we've seen in things like the videos about damage control, outright different doctrines for different scenarios? Or do you ignore that and again drift even farther into not being historical for the sake of quantifiable elements? And either way, that still leaves the question of what this 'generic' crew even means in the first place. Edit: and after writing this, it also occurred to me that there's the "bloodlusted" question; are we assuming to resolve the "1v1" that both ships will, unrealistically, fight until the complete obliteration of their own vessel with no thought of retreat? Abandoning ship? Surrendering? Or do we factor in at what point a ship's captain might decide to try to exit the battle in one form or another (or even that the crew might mutiny), and what impact that would have on the fight? And if so, how do you calculate when that would occur? Does a ship successfully escaping count as a lesser loss than being sunk or captured? Or is it still all the same even though I have a hunch most navies would consider still having their sailors and property intact much, much better than to not. Edit 2: to clarify on the above, I do not mean to imply that there haven't been cases of crews fighting to the final, bloody end against impossible odds, but those were usually a result of circumstances, some larger goal, or an outright inability to escape rather than a case of an entire ship's crew waking up one morning and randomly deciding in unison 'Today is a good day die in a pointlessly fair battle!'

I always found it funny to watch some people go at it with the ships 1v1 thing. It's like a re-run of childhood "my dad's tougher than your dad" sometimes 😂 The sheer number of variables at play are hilarious when it comes to a ship so nothing serious can really be taken from it.

This has indeed been a fun Friday

“Night fighting techniques (…) will have a leg up over anyone who is not Admiral Lee”. Love it!!

Drach always keep in mind that no matter how much of a genius you might be, no matter how advanced your adhesives might be, you just can't fix stupid.

A night action where the British and Japanese have the advantage over everyone ... Except Admiral Lee. That got me laughing as I just rewatched the video you did on Admiral Lee.

In awe of the photos, a good topic, fun Fridays are really....enjoyable

Love the carousel of Big Gun ships! I served on one of the last pure gun ships built years ago, a Forest Sherman Class Destroyer and I have often speculated in my imagination on how it would have fared 1v1 against a peer.

"Warspite is the real world embodiment of plot armour". *happy British noises*

As far as low-probability events ... that actually happened. I write naval survivability modeling software for a living. It comes up all the time when the navy in question (we work with several) wants to recreate a h(y|i)sterical scenario. We keep having to tell them: there is no f#$&!ng way software could have predicted that. For the George Washington fire there were several parallel issues that all contributed to the disaster. Hydraulic fluids were improperly stored in a void space, which was ignited by flicked cigarettes raining down from careless sailors who were lighting up in an unsanctioned area. For the Samuel B. Roberts (FFG-58), what ultimately saved the ship was a sailor disregarding safety protocols. The Hazard class frigates had 3 gas turbines to produce power. Two were destroyed by the mine strike and/or subsequent flooding and fire. The third was actually tagged out as not-working while the ship was under way. An enterprising sailor, realizing the gravity of the situation, climbed into the tagged out generator. He manually operated it for hours, physically taking the role as a defunct control component. But without that generator there would have been no fire pumps, and no auxiliary propulsion. How would our software have modeled that improvised fix? It's literally not in the control manuals we would have used to build the expert system.

I feel like this is a tacit rebuttal to the USS New Jersey’s channel making 45 minute videos about how it’s Phalanxes would do against a swarm of Kamikazes, or how it would fare against Hood, the Scharnhorsts, or the Nelsons. I do enjoy most of their videos and it’s probably a coincidence, but I couldn’t help but connect a lot of Drach’s points here with things I’ve seen them talk about.

That was by a good margin the best squarespace ad I've seen.

I can't believe that, after mentioning Admiral Lee, you didn't include the command factor. Swap ship or fleet commanders and MANY historical battles would have come out differently.

"No navy wants a fair fight." I laughed at that. In my navy days we said if you're not cheating you're not trying hard enough.

Please don’t give up on the “what ifs” scenarios. You briefly touched on one of my great curiosities, what if Tirpitz had actually sortied during Operation Rosselsprung. Tirpitz, Hipper, Lutzow, Scheer, and escorts opposed by Duke of York and Washington, plus escorting cruisers and destroyers. Would Victorious have been in the battle line? How would have the cruisers like Wichita and Tuscaloosa as well as the British cruisers have done?

Speaking for myself, I come here to see and hear your presentation because I am generally interested in military history, and you know far more about naval development and history than I do. I am not interested in what commenters who have limited contact with reality have to say, and think you shouldn't bother yourself with them, i.e. don't feed the trolls.

This really seems to boil down to how many people like to look at history vs how history is actually studied. For a lot of people it is a continuation of a fascination with one specific weapon (system) and the boyish desire to want to know which is the biggest-mostest (as a certain bearded gentleman from Carolina might say). You see it in just about any hobby and it really boils down to wanting to dive into a narrow nice to find the coolest guy/thing/fight or the most awesome guy/thing/fight from the part they particularly like. Having to put reasons why implements of war were designed in a certain way together from the perspective of naval requirements and strategy is also a lot more involved and layered, which is something that only a very limited amount of people have time and interest for.

If someone says the Iowa uses missiles against Yamato just tell them she replies with her wave motion gun

Rowboat vs Dingy! The timeless struggle Drachinifel refuses to bring us.

I mean, if we're going to put future weapons into play, Yamato vs Iowa, the Iowa is gonna have a hard time dealing with Yamato's Wave Motion Gun which its going to be equipped with sometime at the end of the next century

“Assuming both ships are perfect spheres of uniform density, who would win in a fight between HMS Captain and EAS Agamemnon (before its 2261 refit)?”

Ranty Drach is entertaining Drach. Most I've laughed at one of your videos since the 2nd Pacific Squadron. Absolute gold 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

Love a Drach rant. Especially the voice going up an octave at certain moments, 😁 A great & comprehensive "why I don't..." video. Chapeau!

Adjacent to point 1, a hypothetical battleship that goes without AA or secondary batteries and puts the displacement savings in the usual triangle could have an on-paper advantage in a 1v1 against another battleship of comparable tech and size. But it's a worse ship in an actual war.

I loved how you brought up the "soft factors", (crew) when comparing ships. This is something that very rarely thought of. Mostly, as you so correctly state, folks choose a single ship vs single ship without specifying time periods or any of the other excellent points that you brought up. Wonderful episode to an excellent series. Thanks.

"Fun Fridays... Something to do with ships, honest!" Drach always generates laughs

Sitting here laughing about an Iowa launching Tomahawks and Harpoons vs Yamato.....then he said it!!! Roaring with laughter. God, how many times have I had "conversations" like that one!?

As a retired armor officer, I feel the same way about the various online games claiming to depict tank combat. They are totally wrong as tanks don't operate alone (My big problem with "Fury" is that by April 1945 no one would dispatch a platoon of tanks without an accompanying Armored Infantry Platoon in halftracks to eliminate tank killer teams like the one that killed the platoon leaders vehicle) they operate in a combined arms team with infantry, artillery, combat engineers, air defense, attack aviation, close air support, naval gunfire (if you're near the coast), etc. Each arm's strength balances another's weakness.

38:57 - "...Italian shells..." - My first thought on hearing that was about pasta shells with a nice Italian sauce. The ship's gunnery may have been deficient but I imagine before she goes down the galley will feature some fine cuisine. Royal Navy ships did tend to beat up on French and Italian ships during WWII in actual gunfights but who would have won in a cook-off? That's a ship-vs.-ship I'd like to see (and taste). Best of all it could be done repeatedly as most ships tended to survive their own cooking.

similar to arguments on tanks whose was better,tanks were most effective with troop support,battle outcomes depending on weather light fog,

Drach rants are amazing, plus, logic! Love it

Using Seakrieg rules , we did a Bismarck vs Warspite and Renown. Both British ships were mailed and moved to escape . When Warspite scored a non penetrating critical hit that blew up the magazine and Bismarck was gone. To explain this we came up with a member of the Bismarck’s crew opened a hatch for fresh air right as the shell passed into the ship. Randomness spoils everything

But, US battleships did have did have something extra. Willis Augustus Lee

Radar seems to have a significant influence on sea power during WW2. I would like to see a discussion of all the variations...

You're spot on, on all your points. I've often thought the same about them as I listen to Drydocks when you hav't to answer those ship vs ship questions. I often think they're pointless and a waste of time. Keep on with your good works👍

Keep up the excellent work! I recommend you often!

after paddling around the world in a warship for a few years...talking to senior and junior line O's...reading book after book...yada yada yada... naval warfare gets boiled down very simply... some days you get the bear and some days the bear gets you.

Ok, but what would happen if Monitor v Kongo. Don't worry about how the engagement occurred, let's just say Monitor entered Tokyo Bay via orbital drop from a Cessna 172 skyhawk.

so glad Drach put this video out

Drach, you are awesome! Do not let them get you down!!!

It’s too bad people get so butthurt about these 1v1 comparisons, I think they are fun as long as you take it all with a grain of salt. It can also be a good framing device to talk about advances in naval technology, differences between tactics or training in different navies, etc. I understand the issues that will come about on the internet having these discussions though.

Moreover, if you did extended videos on individual matchups, how would we get away with asking you six slightly different questions about the same four naval engagements every month?

I will never know how a Flower Class Corvette versus Roman Quadrireme fight would go now.

This video is what I needed to start my week. You can hear Drach's face sliding further and further into his palm when he talks about some of the hypotheticals he gets asked.

Also, besides the Bismarck hit on the Hood, what are examples of extremely improbably hits on a BB?

I'd add mistakes as another reason why a real world battle is extremely difficult to model. So many battles were partially decided by mistakes. That isn't a dd sir that's a cruiser. oops. They don't have the range, I'm not worried about torpedoes just yet, we can sneak out without air cover, and so many more honest mistakes in identification, stratagy, technical capability and such are a huge factor. And I would say this is different than the competence of the crew skill wise. Another possible add would be intelligence gathering. Many battles were decided long before the opponents met because one side intercepted communications, planted false information, figured out the uboat tactics and such so that the classic fight would never happen as one side had already set up the odds in their favor.

Love that opening. I never had a problem with excellent fixes using sun lines or lines from planets or the moon. Stars always eluded me. In twenty odd years of shooting stars, EVERY fix I plotted put me about 100 miles southwest of the Zagros Mountains, in the middle of the Persian Gulf. Now, many times, that was an accurate fix, as that was our usual deployment. But once I was off Guam, several times off California, often in the Caribbean, once in Lake Michigan, and once off Rios de Janiero.

This used to come up on the sci.military.naval USENET board when I would post and lurk there, back a few years. One of the big ones was "German WW2 Raider vs. Convoy Escorting heavy ship." Say, Scharnhorst vs. USS Arkansas, or USS Pennsylvania, or HMS Malaya, etc.* The big problem here is, maybe the German heavy raider has some support ships, but moreover, the escorting heavy ship has Destroyers and other escorts with the convoy as well. So, instead of Panzerschiffe vs. USS Arkansas or Scharnhorst vs. USS Pennsylvania or HMS Malaya, or Tirpitz vs. same, you end up with the convoy commander turning his heavy ship to fight, while sending the other escort ships to do torpedo runs. Thus, one on one fighting between heavy ships would have been unlikely. *Notwithstanding the usual German orders to raiders telling their commanders to avoid combat with heavy naval units, which were often breached. See: Graf Spee, Bismarck and Prinz Eugen, etc.

From the first roughly half of this I watched I've run into similar debate for Hearts of Iron IV. Whenever someone mentions the ridiculous air warfare system that allows 2000 aircraft to be airborne over northern France in 1940 invariably someone mentions the British 1000 bomber raids. Which if you look into them there were only like three or four of them ever executed and they were barely able to put enough aircraft up to achieve those figures.

About random chances during Bismarck's voyage: PoW also got some hits, that could have altered a lot if the projectiles exploded. One was a shell from Bismarck that ended up inside the torpedo defense system and it would definitely be bad for PoW to have an explosion inside the protected area, not outside. And the other was a shell from Prinz Eugen (agreed, smaller, but it wouldn't matter in that case), which ended up in the propellant charge/round manipulation chamber underneath a secondary aft turret. It exploding would have also resulted in some damage to PoW. And either one could have delayed PoW retreating, which would have allowed Bismarck and Prinz Eugen to score possibly even more hits, maybe even crucial (considering every hit could be a crucial one). And considering when PoW was leaving, the guys in Prinz Eugen were preparing the torpedo launcher, that would also open up more possibilities, if PoW was forced to stay a bit longer. Tl;dr: Yes, you absolutely can't plan in random chance, so you can't know, how it would turn out in the end

I work in applied mathematical modelling of risk assessment and management - Bayesian Belief Nets and @ Risk (the tools I use - but there are many many others) - completely different area but very similar principles and issues arise to those raised here in particular the poor appreciation of point 6. randomness/chance which makes a mockery of those who believe faithfully in linear cause and effect sequences and determinism. Three things that support Drach's scepticism about war gaming: 1. Stochastic timeseries modelling shows how often and how the 'average' cause > effect sequence of events can be very different from the individual timecourses. People should have heard of 'the Butterfly Effect'. Today perhaps a better metaphor is the coronavirus effect - plausibly a tiny mutation somewhere in Covid19's ancestors (termed a top event) led to an event tree of humoungous proportions we are still living through. 2. Bayes nets programming are especially suited to modelling complex cause > effect networks and doing what-if probablistic modelling (you can input real numerical data or 'expert opinion'). These highlight how inherently variable outcomes of 'fault trees' are. The node of most interest is termed the top event - like the Hood exploding. These trees allow the likelihood not just of a battle but other random events which might cause a sinking to be estimated for different what-if scenarios. Ideally the numbers tell you where your vulnerabilities mainly lie. The trick though is to have plausible input data and that turns out to be really really hard and this is arguably the whole point of Drach's offering here and objection to spinning naive narartives. 3. A few years ago I was at a Bayes Net conference where some defence related people described their own use of these computer systems when designing a patrol boat. The problem was this. In a complex machine that is a boat of any kind, its functioning is dependent on all sorts of interaction mechanical and communications systems and a degree of redundancy still operating when under attack. How do you identify its greatest vulnerabilities given this complexity. To understand what might happen they first created a stochastic model of the boat in 3-D, ran it and recorde what would happen if say a small shell landed in different random locations. This created a massive number of what-if scenario outputs with different impact event magnitudes impacting on different boat systems. The output from this model was then analysed using a Bayes Net which could identify where the greatest vulnerability lay. IRT the latter. a. I am not giving away any great secret here. This quantitative risk modelling is what professionals do routinely when they are trying to assess ANY complex system...e.g. dam safety, flooding and so forth and each situation. The best developed area is probably in business where big profits are there to be made from identifying marginal but robust opportunities. b. The bigger message here is that playing genuinely credible what-if games is far more complex than making up a new story about say the battle of Gettysburg and playing with toy soldiers. You can believe of course whatever you want to believe. But you really will be kidding yourself - hence Drach's partial allergy - unless you do what professional people do. c. This said I am not disparaging scenario exploration which is a great way to think about many problems. I am just saying there are good ways and bad ways and the good ways are damn hard.

I love how the things done in the square space ad are also just the things you did on that page. (yes watch the ad again)

24:30 this caught me totally off guard. I even go so far that USS Constitution would have defeated USS Iowa in 1941!

U.S.NAVY Advance Boiler Technician BT3 Bryant(the last of the boiler technicians)checking in my friend. U.S.S. Gridley CG-21 10-17-84.

Thank you very much drac I find you videos very entertaining, amusing and educational I have learned so much long may you carry on cheers

"NOOOOOOO....STOP IT..." I fucking DIED.

Hey Drach, love the channel, How would the Millennium Falcon do against the Bismarck? 🙂

A cursory familiarity with a number of battles suggests to me a "soft factor" sometimes overlooked: momentum of a battle, campaign, or war. Assuming the equality of other factors, it seems logical to expect soldiers and sailors will take fewer risks, and commanders will be more reluctant to sacrifice their subordinates' lives, if victory in the battle or war appears unattainable. Some experience backs this conclusion; contrast the behaviour of the Japanese units in the battles of the Java Sea which destroyed the ABDA, with Admiral Kurita's retreat at the battle off Samar.

Great video Drach, I remember your early Drydock videos had these ship X vs Ship Y

Some amazing stuff on this channel. 300+ individual ships in 5min summaries...... longer reviews of ships that featured during a certain time period.... Wednesday specials and Friday Fun DAYS.... So much to choose from and there is always something new to find. Not formatted as well as it could be (library style) but if you know what you want you can search for it.Amazed at the depth of ships featured..

Fun Friday are cool as it gives us time to recover from our Wednesday rum ration... Or maybe I should not use a gallon as ration measurement tool😇

A neat video and I agree that one on one fights for capital ships is fruitless, though it did happen at least three times during the French Revolutionary and the Napoleonic Wars when single French and British 74s matched up to each other. On the other hand, I'm not sure about the tech comment. Yes, the North Carolina and Washington in 1941 did NOT have an SG and only had Mk.1(FA) fire control radar (basically a Mk.3 with antennas stacked on top of each other like a Mk.4). However, they had the complete fire control system that was aboard every US fast battleship. This doesn't just come from Friedman's Naval Gunnery but from the USN's manuals on fire control and from articles on US battleship gunnery from Jurens and others. The Mk.38 fire control director fed the Mk.8 rangekeeper, one in each protected fire control compartment. The Mk.8 was linked to a Stable Vertical Mk.41 (IIRC), which was a gyroscope system that maintained an artificial horizon. All the other nation's capital ship fire control systems required a cross-level telescope on the director to maintain the visual horizon. The combination of rangekeeper and stable vertical DEMONSTRATED in numerous tests before and during the war, the ability to maintain a firing solution on an enemy ship that was maneuvering (not violently) at 20 kts while the US BB did the same. No figure eights at full speed. Ac power allowed synchros to feed data from the FCD and other sources directly into the rangekeeper, where DC powered ships had to substitute manual input to their fire control computers. It should be pointed out here that the Germans were the only other navy that adopted AC power. Even RN MAGSLIPS had to transmit data in steps. Finally, the firing solution was not fed by follow the pointer or visual signals (counters) or verbally, but through remote power control which allowed what essentially continuous aim. All of this in 1941, not post-war. Finally, the AC power system allowed the massive switchboard to link turrets and secondary mounts to main, alternate (CT and turret no.2) and secondary directors almost w/o delay, compared to a DC powered ship that could take an hour to bring all turrets and directors fore and aft, re-calibrate the transmission system and re-set the fire control computer before switching between the fore and aft main gun directors. After some e-mail exchanges with the USS North Carolina Museum, it is possible the RPC was not installed or active when launched but was certainly so before Sep 41. And by mid-1942, both ships did have RPC and SG when operating with the Home Fleet against Tirpitz as did some of the South Dakota class, who also had 10cm Mk.8 FCR when Tirpitz still had 80cm FuMo 27 (Seetakt). This was the result of BuOrd using seed money and cooperating with GE and RCA and other US electronic firms, just as they did with Edison and GE for high temp/high pressure boilers and turbines and with the locomotive industry, where the diesel-electric system was tried and proved and then moved onto the fleet subs.

Drach: "I do (...) in "The Dry Dock", but then "The Dry Dock is a much shorter format" Me: yeah, about that.... Drach: "..for each individuaal question..." Me: oh

Hi Drach. Please , please, please do a myth busting video on common naval misconceptions. Partly because I'm interested in finding out how many I share, but mostly because we love it when you do your nut.

Some of the questions I dislike most are "If this ship from 2022 goes back in time, can it sink that battleship?"

Drach taking them to task for blatant Yankee bias!!!! The Iowa’s were good enough as is. They were not unsinkable as many would like to believe. Every ship had trade offs in the design

You used to do them, and I was wondering why that stopped a few years ago. Thanks for the explanation.

I really enjoyed your comment at 24:45 of the Bismark vs the hull of the Iowa.

Well clearly in New Jersey VS Yamato, New Jersey would win because she'd be spotting with her drone well plastering Yamato with W23 shells. /s

This reminds me of the 1v1s in the Pirates of the Caribbean. * In the first movie, the Interceptor, a brig, was facing against a cursed skeleton crew whose Indiaman had oars for extra propulsion. * In the second, Black Pearl was against a cursed flyut/Vasa/submarine hybrid in calm seas. The Dutchman had its submarine ability plus a bigger broadside and tri-barrel rapid fire chaser guns. Oh wait, the Pearl is literally the fastest ship in the Caribbean and had the the wind on her side. So the Dutchman had to "cheat" via Kraken to do any real damage and sink her. * In the third it took A LITERAL goddess and a malestrom to force a fight against the Pearl and Dutchman where only broadside weight mattered and the wild card (Captain Jack Sparrow notwithstanding) was the fact that the immortality of the Dutchman's captain was at stake. Not speaking for the realism (or lack thereof otherwise) in the movies, I'm just pointing out that even there, there are hardly any preconditions that lead to a "fair fight". There's always a supernatural force or the weather in play.

Great discussion! I can completely see your point! Cheers!