WI: The Back up plan to counter Yamato

If it doesn't get sunk, humanity is up shit creek when the forces of the hostile planet Gamilon under War Leader Desslok bombard Earth in two hundred years.


Yes, yes, stupid joke comment is stupid. No need to double-post and explain the joke. If we didn't get it in the first place, we're not likely to give a crap about an old anime series. In my case, I got the joke and still don't care.

Besides, it looks like the conclusion is: it'll be sunk one way or another. So humanity will be just fine.
 
Musashi took something like 19 torpedo hits and 17 bomb hits I recall.

I have noticed that several people have have said that the Yamato had:
very poor gunnery control
I wish to disagree. While the American ships DID have radar guided guns and therefore had much better gunnery control, the Yamato and indeed all Japanese ships had far superiour optics for gunnery control.

I read a book about Yamato and it said that she carried a 30 meter optical range finder, the biggest ever built!

The Japanese carried the finest naval optics afloat in 1945 and in an optics vs optics single ship fight would do much more damage.

Of course, compared to radar guided fire control, optics is pretty crap!

The other thing I want to query is the quality of the Yamato's armor. I have read several tests conducted on the Shinato's turret armor (3rd Yamato) after WWII by the Americans and how the latest American 16" super heavy shell could easily penetrate the armor etc etc etc.
What is not said is the following (You have to read the detail and cross check to find out!)
1) The shell used was designed POST WWII
2) The gun used was brand new and had only been fired once before. This is important as a worn gun would have less muzzle velocity and therefore less hitting power.
3) The shell was fired with a double charge. Unpractical in combat as it may go boom in the turret, and lowers the rate of fire.
4) The gun was fired at the armor plate at a range of 1000 yards. Tell me when in combat you would get a battleship that close to an opponent still firing at you???
5) The shell was fired into the armor plate square on (90 degree hitting angle). The section of armor plate they tested was a main turret face plate. These were supposed to be inclined at 60 degrees I think. This would give different protection properties than at the angle tested.

Also, when the Americans tested the armor plate in a laboratory (metal tests) they were surprised to find that it was actually had better percentages of metals than contempoary American armor, and they concluded that it was infact a high quality armor plate.

I think that armor and gun article was online. I will try and find it later if I remember!

EDIT: I am not disputing that she would of been sunk. Just a few details about he construction etc.
 

burmafrd

Banned
hitting and penetrating the turret would have been hard no matter what. The IJN armor was not up to the quality of US and UK armor of the time. That has been established in many books and articles over the years. The shear AMOUNT of armor was what made those ships so tough. 20" of even somewhat inferior grade of armor is still going to be hard to penetrate at any reasonable range (Washington vs Kirishima was around 8000 yds and that is really knife fighting territory for BBs). I seriously doubt that any ships would have even gotten to within 10000 yds of each other.

One other fact about the IJN super battleships. They spent so much time in harbor due to lack of fuel that they had very little practice in gunnery or much of anything else that needed sea time. That was shown during Leyte Gulf when the IJN BBs got less then a dozen hits in total despite shooting over 1000 rds of main battery. Now one can say they were exhausted, etc, but the fact was that they were shooting at those CVE's that could do 19 knots at extreme and they hit one once. Yamato from what I can gather got a grand total of 2 hits.
 
One other fact about the IJN super battleships. They spent so much time in harbor due to lack of fuel that they had very little practice in gunnery or much of anything else that needed sea time. That was shown during Leyte Gulf when the IJN BBs got less then a dozen hits in total despite shooting over 1000 rds of main battery. Now one can say they were exhausted, etc, but the fact was that they were shooting at those CVE's that could do 19 knots at extreme and they hit one once. Yamato from what I can gather got a grand total of 2 hits.

Somehow the Japanese heavy ships did not do well in gunnery during the daytime at all. Consider, for example, an incident during the East Indies campaign. The battleships Hiei and Kirishims and the heavy cruisers Tone and Chikuma spent an hour shooting at the destroyer Edsall and managed to score a grand total of one hit. (See A Blue Sea of Blood: Deciphering the Mysterious Fate of the USS Edsall by Donald M. Kehn, Jr. (2008) for this ludicrous story.)
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
IJN Armor was remarkably uneven in quality. Pieces tested post war from the same batch were found to be both of poor quality AND the strongest armor ever tested. This was a result of available materials more than any flaw in the Japanese QC effort, although the Japanese used a fairly old (arguably obsolescent) manufacturing scheme.

This is a fairly interesting, albeit somewhat technically esoteric, article on armor quality. A number of other articles by the same author can be found on both the Combinedfleet.com and Navweps.com sites.

http://www.combinedfleet.com/okun_biz.htm

As far as the amount of damage that the Musashi took, it was remarkable that it floated long enough to take the total number of hits it did, however, how many of those hits were merely "gilding the lily" is an open question. There are some researchers who believe that half the total hits were more or less unnecessary and the ship would have gone down with or without them taking place. It is interesting to note that her sister Yamato suffered a fatal magazine explosion after taking almost exactly half the damage (10 torpedo hits and 7 bombs) that Musashi took at Leyte.

Musashi took something like 19 torpedo hits and 17 bomb hits I recall.

I have noticed that several people have have said that the Yamato had:

I wish to disagree. While the American ships DID have radar guided guns and therefore had much better gunnery control, the Yamato and indeed all Japanese ships had far superiour optics for gunnery control.

I read a book about Yamato and it said that she carried a 30 meter optical range finder, the biggest ever built!

The Japanese carried the finest naval optics afloat in 1945 and in an optics vs optics single ship fight would do much more damage.

Of course, compared to radar guided fire control, optics is pretty crap!

The other thing I want to query is the quality of the Yamato's armor. I have read several tests conducted on the Shinato's turret armor (3rd Yamato) after WWII by the Americans and how the latest American 16" super heavy shell could easily penetrate the armor etc etc etc.
What is not said is the following (You have to read the detail and cross check to find out!)
1) The shell used was designed POST WWII
2) The gun used was brand new and had only been fired once before. This is important as a worn gun would have less muzzle velocity and therefore less hitting power.
3) The shell was fired with a double charge. Unpractical in combat as it may go boom in the turret, and lowers the rate of fire.
4) The gun was fired at the armor plate at a range of 1000 yards. Tell me when in combat you would get a battleship that close to an opponent still firing at you???
5) The shell was fired into the armor plate square on (90 degree hitting angle). The section of armor plate they tested was a main turret face plate. These were supposed to be inclined at 60 degrees I think. This would give different protection properties than at the angle tested.

Also, when the Americans tested the armor plate in a laboratory (metal tests) they were surprised to find that it was actually had better percentages of metals than contempoary American armor, and they concluded that it was infact a high quality armor plate.

I think that armor and gun article was online. I will try and find it later if I remember!

EDIT: I am not disputing that she would of been sunk. Just a few details about he construction etc.
 

burmafrd

Banned
Probably with the Musashi many of the torp hits might have hit the same place causing less additional damage. As I recall the Yamato was so short of fuel that she took little evasive action which more then likely allowed the attackers to do a better job; Still from all accounts those two ships took more torpedo hits then any other large ships on record before sinking, so however you look at it its impressive.
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
Probably with the Musashi many of the torp hits might have hit the same place causing less additional damage. As I recall the Yamato was so short of fuel that she took little evasive action which more then likely allowed the attackers to do a better job; Still from all accounts those two ships took more torpedo hits then any other large ships on record before sinking, so however you look at it its impressive.

Well, they did have the advantage of being 20,000 tons larger than any other ship as well. :D

I will admit they took a LOT of sinking.
 
Also,the Americans learnt from Musashi when it came to dealing with the Yamato.

On the Musashi, the torpedoes hit both sides of the ship, causing un-intentinal counter flooding. With Yamato, the airmen were told to only attack one side of her so that she capsized.
 
Top