Seydlitz and Derfflinger were engaging Queen Mary so if she survived those would be the most likely ships to take additional damage from a surviving Queen Mary. That said its entirely possible that Queen Mary would suffer severe damage due to the combined fire power of two German Battlecruisers.
Even if QM succumbs to the damage from the two ships, another shell or two in the right areas is all it would take to doom at least one of the ships, meaning the RN loses 3 BC's to 2 instead of the 3 to 1 of OTL, and they sank 2 of Germany's 3 newest BC's while only losing 1 newer BC and 2 older ships. It looks better to the public in terms of numbers sunk, and might actually be nearly even in terms of the effectiveness of the lost ships from a more educated perspective.
Of course Tiger took a lot of damage and kept on trucking along so its likely Queen Mary would have well had she not blown up
And yet she still had sufficient speed to outrun the German battlefleet and thus survive. And given Queen Mary is very similar in design to her assuming she doesn't go boom she's likely to be able to do the same
The Cats were strong ships when the crews followed the rules. Not quite battleship strong but good ships. The closely related Kongo's show that.
IIRC, An experienced gunnery officer was transferred to Tiger to try and whip her shooting teams into shape. He wisely, but bravely, ignored the Admirals orders in regards to ammunition handling.
Against the Kongo, Tiger had an even chance. Sadly for her, it was Tiger and Alaska versus Kongo, Haruna, Nagato, and Mutsu. They did fight gallantly off of Samar.
As others have alluded to, and I will explain in a later post, this is not HMS Lion from WW1. This is a new ship more along the lines of a fully armored battlecruiser.
I'm surprised nobody talked about how asb my ambush off Samar, especially when compared to the otl battle of Samar.
I wanted to make a post talking about the Izumo's design which is taken from world of warships but itself is taken from a preliminary design for the Yamato. Originally I was going to use Hiraga's design X that I mentioned in my post but didn't for a number of reasons. These reasons were mainly its slow speed of 26 knots and also using two types of turrets which makes manufacturing complicated. I personally did not like Fujimoto's proposed 35,000-ton battleship because the secondaries were outside the main armored belt and I felt that it would risk an explosion of the secondary battery.
Another thing I noticed when reading about the preliminary designs for the Yamato class was how many of the preliminary designs had an all-forward armament so I decided to go forward with using a different design for what I imagine a treaty battleship built by the IJN would look like. Of course, I should mention that I have a bias in favor of all designs with all forward armaments and high speeds.
The thing that I would like to discuss is displacement. The preliminary design for the Izumo is A140-J2 which would have displaced about 54,000 tons. Why the Japanese cheated they cheated within reason. The thing I am confused about is how Hiraga and Fujimoto designed a 35,000-ton battleship with about the same armament and armor. Did the extra 3 knots really add about 19,000 tons in displacement or am I missing something for why A140-J2 displaced so much more than the proposed treaty battleships?
Seydlitz should have been sunk during the night when she ran across a British Battle Squadron who decided not to fire on her so they wouldn't give away their position.
Von Der Tann was also in rough shape IIRC with all of her main battery turrets knocked out and some flooding from hits from 5th Battle Squadron. And some of those hits were close to her steering compartment too. and could have been fatal. I could be wrong but Moltke seems to have lived a charmed life as far as German battlecruisers at Jutland go.
If the seas had been anything but flat calm I don't see Seydlitz getting home. As it is they had to chuck a lot over the side to get her into port.
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hell she technically didn't make it to port they had to ground her at the entrance to jade estuary for a couple weeks first due to several factors among them the fact that her draft was now too deep to get in and to get her that far required a pair of pumpships to be alongside her
Oh for Engadine's 184's to have found her. Even though they only carried 14" torpedoes that would have either finished her off or forced the Germans to scuttle. She was certainly in no condition to fight them off or evade.
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or for a second torpedo to have hit her from one the British Destroyers
According to wikipedia (yes,I know), at 23:30 Moltke was on her own, and encountered 4 british dreadnoughts.
Which didn't open fire so they didn't reveal their location to the german fleet!
As Moltke had 1000 tons of water on board, and was reduced to 22 knots it wouldn't have taken much to put her down as well.
Which didn't open fire so they didn't reveal their location to the german fleet!
As Moltke had 1000 tons of water on board, and was reduced to 22 knots it wouldn't have taken much to put her down as well.
I once was told that the reason the Russian ships had so many weapon systems was because they lacked the number of engineers in the fleet to keep them running unlike on a western warship.
So they simply doubled down on the number of guns, CIWS and missile systems etc and anything that went U/S while on deployment would be fixed when they returned to a major port.
So this explanation marries up with what I heard.
My mates dad who was a Russian speaking linguist in the RN visited (I think it was the Bezuprechny) when she visited Portsmouth in 1990 (?)
Apparently she was in a right old state and the crew had obviously painted over anything not nailed down in an effort to hide her poor material condition - including the rust and the damage control equipment lockers.
I think the Soviet/Russian general lack of training of their crews for such repairs is another thing which has to be considered. They needed more redundancy because the ships crew could only perform basic repairs and rely on port facilities to do any needed repair work. Of course the issue was the dockyards were often too overworked and inadequately funded to do such work.
I'd expect this is also one of the reasons they were first on the gas turbine bandwagon - steam boiler plants, especially the high-pressure, high-temp variety, can be an absolute pain in the ass to keep running. Gas turbine? Just haul out the whole assembly and drop in a new one.
HMS Leopard 1915 half sister of HMS Tiger the main modification was the switch to solely oil fired small tube boilers and an increase in the armoured belt. Fought at Jutland and took fire off Queen Mary at a critical moment allegedly allowing her to survive. Claimed the fatal hits on Seydlitz but this is disputed. Three Majestic class ships were decommissioned to provide trained crew for her.
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