I am no expert on SHBB but i thought it was anything over 55 tons? At least in the late 30s and early 40s?
Extra Credits - Sinking the Bismark
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I am no expert on SHBB but i thought it was anything over 55 tons? At least in the late 30s and early 40s?
As far as i know there is no official definition, it is just a gaming definition. To me it is a matter of role and function as much as anything else. The only ones I would really point to are the Yamatos and they are really a bad buy. But no more bad than, say, the Maus...
If you look at a warship beyond simply a collection of stats and think about it as an operational unit, then an SHBB on the Yamato pattern is a huge black hole into which you pour fuel and resources and is it a good pay off at the end? I would prefer a couple more ships with the same capability as the Nagatos and I would still have enough left over for a fleet carrier...
K
I guess it is hard to identify due to the definitions over all. I only build the Bismarck and Tirpirtz for flavor anyways as well as the Graf Zeppelen but boy,..... is it hard on the priorities list!
Anything over 55 tons would qualify every ship modeled in the game as a SHBB.
I believe you meant 55000 tons?As previously stated, there is no official designation of SHBB. The Yamatos were classified as BBs, just really BIG. It is a game term (as far as I know only Paradox uses it) to differentiate these monstrosities from what other countries were building. Even using 55000 tons as a cutoff, the Bismarks would not qualify, as they were only ~51000 tons under full load, where as the Yamatos were ~73000 tons full load.
Why do documentaries on Denmark Strait have this obsession of showing the deck hit as some kind of deeply plunging shell? The putative deck hit would have passed through weaker part of the belt and then hit a steeply downward sloping part of the deck. It's best generalized as penetration of weak spot in the side armour.
This was because Holland's tactic actually worked. He successfully closed the range to the point Bismarck would have been ineffective against the conventional horizontal part of Hood's deck. Only to be ruined by ridiculous chance hit...
What critical parts specifically were unprotected? At least of the kind that could be feasibly protected and were so on other ships of this kind? Mind you, when the Prince of Wales was hit in stern by torpedo, she did not get a jammed rudder but rather suffered a massive failure of watertight integrity and sank.
The armour scheme was a fine modern version of the old incremental protection, was weight efficient for side protection because it also used the main deck for that purpose (important in that WW2 BB duels happened at relatively short ranges) and showed apparently advanced understanding of spaced armour.
This was because Holland's tactic actually worked. He successfully closed the range to the point Bismarck would have been ineffective against the conventional horizontal part of Hood's deck. Only to be ruined by ridiculous chance hit...
What critical parts specifically were unprotected? At least of the kind that could be feasibly protected and were so on other ships of this kind? Mind you, when the Prince of Wales was hit in stern by torpedo, she did not get a jammed rudder but rather suffered a massive failure of watertight integrity and sank.
The armour scheme was a fine modern version of the old incremental protection, was weight efficient for side protection because it also used the main deck for that purpose (important in that WW2 BB duels happened at relatively short ranges) and showed apparently advanced understanding of spaced armour.
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Anything over 55 tons would qualify every ship modeled in the game as a SHBB.
As previously stated, there is no official designation of SHBB. The Yamatos were classified as BBs, just really BIG. It is a game term (as far as I know only Paradox uses it) to differentiate these monstrosities from what other countries were building. Even using 55000 tons as a cutoff, the Bismarks would not qualify, as they were only ~51000 tons under full load, where as the Yamatos were ~73000 tons full load.
Ah yes sir, i meant 55K, i guess i was being lazy in my writing. And actually i couldnt remember if it was 50 or 55K, but does sound right being 51K for Bismarck. I guess the Bismarck and SHBB in general can be debated anyway you look at it. I guess i always figured history put her in the SHBB position due to her class size over the current RN BBs and due to her infamy. The Yamato was indeed a design class of her own, but the carrier and her air power arm still is king. Thank God U.S. politicians were dumb enough to see carriers only as a defensive weapon in the 1930s. You can't escape political stupidity but it is always good when it helps in the end.
Bismarck did have issues. One key one that became critical was the absence of pumping gear and valves between the fuel tanks, which meant that the hit she suffered at the hands of Prince of Wales had a detrimental effect upon seakeeping and slowed her down more than would have been the case. This was corrected in Tirpitz. AA protection was not ideal, maybe a result of the KM not really having to face air attack as the RN had in Italy and Norway. The 3.7cm guns had too low a rate of fire and there were not enough 2cm AA. Also, there seems to have been no AA training against low flying aircraft, which is odd as you would expect that from a Swordfish or Albacore.
Not the fault of Bismarck, but Lutjens did have a habit of making long radio transmissions to Berlin, making him vulnerable to Huff Duff detection. Also, the lucky hit at 9.02 that knocked out two turrets at once is not really her fault, no more than the freak hit on Hood. But this was from Rodney, and the examination of the wreck has shown that Rodney's high velocity 16" shells were able to penetrate the turret facings and CT and the main belt of Bismarck, although the low velocity 14" shells of KGV did not: but she was generally further away in the engagement. One question is the ineffectiveness of Bismarck's gunnery against Tovey's force, when she was on the button at Denmark Strait. I know an 8" shell took away her forward director above the CT.
What finally did for her, the results of the torpedo hit aft, was a flaw carried over from the Bayerns: a three screw arrangement made her more vulnerable, whilst the access and emergency equipment was poor verging on non-existent. But looking at film from the wreck, I am not sure anything would have helped as it is so stuffed into the stern.
(With Prince of Wales, by the way, it is worth mentioning the flooding hit came after a near miss had thrown generators off their mountings. The result being that the interior was plunged into darkness that hampered the work of damage control teams and stopped the pumps working. She was by no means as vulnerable as your comment suggests. The risk of machinery coming adrift from mountings was corrected in the other KGVs).
There were also issues such as habitability, general wetness and poor seakeeping. These are not, by any means, going to make Bismarck a bad design (the Nelsons and Hood all had 'submarine propensities') but the designs showed the lack of study and experience the Germans suffered from in the interwar period. It is not like they laid down the Gniesenaus and shook them down, learned lessons and then moved forward. As soon as Gniesenau and Scharnhorst were out of the slips, Bismarck and Tirpitz were on them. No time taken to learn.
K
It's ironic that no low AA training and a lack of good AA to begin with coupled with the fact that air power brought her to her knees (or in circles in this case......) from the American made PBY that spotted her to the naval air arm swordfish, obsolete yet still so deadly in this case for Bismarck.
There is nothing related to a SHBB in reality. In HoI it is a tech that allows Japan to build the Yamato-class in the 1930s, and in D-grade documentaries saying "super battleship" is more "exciting" I guess. Talking about "super battleships" or anything like that isn't at all helpful when actually looking at the development of navies because it implies there was something unique that set them apart from battleships. There wasn't. It was just a natural progression of battleship design. If not for the WNT, nations would have been building ships roughly the size of the Yamato-class by the end of the 1920s. Nobody with a functioning brain would have built anything larger than the 64-65k ton (standard) range.
Apparently Bismarck's 105mm suite was almost dysfunctional initially. The normal (semi-)automated real-time means that were used to feed the solution to the mounts did not work, IIRC particularly at low elevations and hence against targets like torpedo bombers. If this was not corrected those guns would have needed to get their solution verbally or shoot on local control.
Though, there is only one known penetration into Bismarck's citadel proper below the armoured deck.
Can't remember the part about generators but there definitely was a case of damage control failure. But fair enough. I was bit too brash. The point meant was that stern could be incredebly vulnerable in other ships as well, and that other designs generally suffered from various kinks as well.
Few other KGV faults that comes to mind are poor ventilation, lack of redundancy in communications and arguably the use of watertight centerline subdivision.
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The quadruple mountings were arguably too over complicated and gave no end of trouble, minor or major. No ship of the period is without her faults, and I suspect modern ones are exactly the same in different ways. It is the older stuff where you have ironed out the faults, and then things start breaking down through old age. You can't win...
K
You can see it as classic RN carrier doctrine. Find/Fix/Fight for the carrier aircraft. Slow the enemy and allow them to be brought within range of the guns of the Home Fleet. Even if she had got to France it would have been an almost round the clock effort by the RAF and she would have had to go to St Nazaire as the only drydock where she could have been repaired.
K