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USS Iowa comes back to life for its final voyage

JohnVF said:
Hood was a death trap but the prettiest one afloat. I think that actually played into her demise. She was so stately, balanced, and pretty that she sort of became a poster child for the Royal Navy. And what good would it be to have your poster child in drydock for a few years, with her appearance being changed? What signal does that send? So she was left to fight in her largely original fit, incredibly inadequate even for the engagements likely when she was built, much less 20 years later.

Just my theory! I love the Hood. I think she was the ship of ships as far as looks go.
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After the retrofit, she still would have been a fine looking ship. She just would have been a better looking ship all around. Decent armour. Better range.Better AA armament. Faster. Her ass wouldn't have been dragging through the water in every wave.

As the Hood would have looked after her rebuild:

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Bigerik said:
A commerce raider? Really? Thats like saying the SL-1200 is just a turntable!
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She beat an old classic that was flawed from the beginning but was done in by technology that had passed her by, and newer competitors. Maybe Bismarck as an SL-1200 is an apt analogy.

And something about a Fairey Swordfish reminds me of the WTRP.
 
Oh, and I think Hood's freeboard problem on her quarterdeck would have been worse after the refit, no? The superstructure is a bit more compact but the added armor couldn't have helped things back there. I still like the looks of her as-built. I should go dig that Trumpeter kit out of storage.
 
Only the Americans caught on that the true use of battleships would be as fast AA escorts for the fast carriers. People talk about 14", 16" and 18" guns but the greatest naval gun of WW II was probably the American dual purpose 5".

Or the 40mm Bofors gun.

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Tom Brennan said:
Only the Americans caught on that the true use of battleships would be as fast AA escorts for the fast carriers. People talk about 14", 16" and 18" guns but the greatest naval gun of WW II was probably the American dual purpose 5".
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And the greatest big gun was the 16"-50 caliber Mark 7 gun on the Iowas and the Montanas.

Though a case can be made that in actual use, the best big gun ever was the British 15"-42 Mark 1. Developed for the Queen Elizabeth class in 1915 and even used on the final British battleship, Vanguard.
 
I think that's a difference of "best" vs. "most used to good effect as intended".

Speaking of which, I forgot about Warspite's action in Narvik.
 
JohnVF said:
Oh, and I think Hood's freeboard problem on her quarterdeck would have been worse after the refit, no? The superstructure is a bit more compact but the added armor couldn't have helped things back there. I still like the looks of her as-built. I should go dig that Trumpeter kit out of storage.
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Iirc, the new machinery was so much more compact and lighter, that they could have added armor and still have her back to her original weight. She was horrendously overweight at the beginning of ww2. And the new turbines were even slightly more powerful.
 
JohnVF said:
I think that's a difference of "best" vs. "most used to good effect as intended".

Speaking of which, I forgot about Warspite's action in Narvik.
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Not only used to best effect, but also most effective in use. I recall reading that it was the most reliable big gun of WW2. Warspite also made the hit on Giulio Caesare at 26,000 yards, so accuracy was pretty good too.
 
Tom Brennan said:
IMO the greatest Limey sailors of WW II were Cunningham and Walker.
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While Phillips was the most useless. Almost as bad as that bonehead Montgomery was on land.

I think Holland gets a bit of a bum rap. He actually didn't handle things too terribly, but he just couldn't buy a break that day. His big mistake was not putting PofW in the lead, but that was probably experience working against him. Plus the worries of depending too much on an incomplete ship.

Leach must have felt indestructible after surviving the bridge hit. But Phillips managed to use up his luck too.
 
That proposed Refit of Hood looks much more balanced, IMHO. It would have probably been impossible, but moving the seaplane catapult to the aft end of the deck, eliminating that part of the superstructure and moving everything else forward, then moving the #3 turret to the space vacated by the superstructure and moving the #4 turret to the former location of #3 would have looked even better, and probably done a lot to help with that freeboard problem by getting a turret structure off of the very back end of the keel.
 
Sam Cogley said:
That proposed Refit of Hood looks much more balanced, IMHO. It would have probably been impossible, but moving the seaplane catapult to the aft end of the deck, eliminating that part of the superstructure and moving everything else forward, then moving the #3 turret to the space vacated by the superstructure and moving the #4 turret to the former location of #3 would have looked even better, and probably done a lot to help with that freeboard problem by getting a turret structure off of the very back end of the keel.
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Problem with that is you would have to basically rebuild half the ship. The place where you want to move the turret to is about where the engine room is. Then you'd have to move the magazines, all the machinery, etc.

It would be interesting to see tho! :)
 
Yeah, the turret mechanisms in these ships go deep down into them, multi-level rotating fortresses.
 
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