The Drydock - Episode 080

The reason for guns being grouped closely together is quite simple: to make the turret narrower. Narrower turret not only means less steel needed to maintain a given thickness of armor, it also means a narrower barbette is possible. Which in turn means the ship as a whole can be narrower. During the era of the Washington and London Naval Treaties this was very important, because everybody was trying to fit as much combat capacity as possible into the 10,000 ton limit (give or take some extra tonnage from cheating). The reason this isn't always done, and guns ended up being spaced further apart, is that closely spacing the guns had 2 significant downsides. The first is that it reduces the rate of fire, because the gun crews start to get in each other's way if you pack them too close together. The second is that it makes the guns less accurate, because if the shells leave the barrel at the same time, the air they displace will cause them to disrupt each other's flight paths.

Q&A: How common and successful were land based torpedo launchers? Blucher aside, was there any other notable ships they sunk? Also on some turrets the guns are grouped closely together such as on the Pensacola class, but on other ships they were spaced apart, what was the reason for this?

As a resident in flyover country, I would accept your apology except I was never offended in the first place. I can safely say that the article you read was correct in that the rural areas were not particularly industrialized, but farmers were forced to learn how to fix most anything. By the 20's farms were mechanizing with tractors, generators (until rural electrification came along), and assorted other machinery. So while there were few folks who could run an assembly line for function therein, the fly over states offered a fair share of machinery savvy souls. This didn't include my family who were busy making beer, selling jewelry, accounting services, and selling real estate.

Kristin

How do I submit a design?

DD 79 reboot? Yeah, the rum is involved.

Vintage Car History

The rum is ready.

Matt Blom