德拉克講海軍歷史 盤點5個海軍工程災難

Patreon的好朋友們 就像我上次做的 關於航空工程失敗的視頻一樣 他們要求我再做一次 所以我們來吧 至少這次我們只有五艘船 要處理 既然我們已經探討了 一些比較明顯的災難 這些會是幾個 比較微妙的失敗 在於如何建造一艘船 並使其有用的作用 雖然你可能會感到驚訝 這些失敗的情況 有多麼糟糕 首先,在沒有任何規定之下 我們有 Nuestra Senora de la Santissima Trinidad 是一艘航空母艦 在航行的年代 通常被稱為 Napoleonic Wars中 最大的和最重的軍艦之一 當這場戰爭 實際發生的時候 它的長度和寬度 實際上已經超過了 也許只是 法國海洋級的軍艦之一 然而 這艘船擁有很多槍 大約有130-140槍 視乎你的源頭 和它在哪個年代 但是這張紙上的火力 隱藏了幾個艦艇的重要問題 一開始 Santissima Trinidad 曾經是一艘 標準的112槍 三艘航空母艦 一艘相當不錯的航空母艦 它的航行能力 並不是最佳 相比HMS Victory 航空母艦 但後來 這艘航空母艦 Santissima Trinidad 擁有的 總體來說 是尺寸和耐用性 建造在 優秀的 Havana航空公園 它可以 並後來 承受了巨大的壓迫 至少保持了 某種程度的運作 雖然不是 直接的先鋒 在設計上 在它的建築上 會影響 未來的西班牙航空母艦 包括 相當優秀的 Santa Ana航空母艦 一開始 錯誤的地方 是在早期 1790年代 當某人有了一個 明智的想法 加入Fauxel 和Quart deck 一起建造 一個持續的 Fourth Gun Deck 現在只有 Poop Deck 在她的 Deck Lines上 雖然這 技術上 能夠提供 更多的火力 但兩個最大的問題 就是 這個增加的 火力 本身 和新的建築 航空母艦的 首先 看看建築 增加的 重量 意味著 她的 Lower Gun Deck 現在靠近 水面 在 一開始 一般來說 這一直是 某種程度 的問題 甚至在航空母艦 有足夠的 清晰度 減少這個 增加重量 在上面 可能會有問題 在航空母艦 平均 或更糟糕的清晰度 可能會有 更大的 潛在問題 但無論如何 它限制了 Lower Gun Deck 和其中 最重的榴彈 在 平靜 或清晰的海洋 任何重物 有波浪 可能超過 三到六公尺高 有些 或所有的榴彈 都必須關閉 因此 減少了航空母艦的 火力 相當嚴重 因為每一個 36公斤的榴彈 在航空母艦 最低的榴彈 榴彈 的重量 是 4.5公斤 的長榴彈 在 新的 Lower Gun Deck 高度 加上 多了 更多的 海面空間 和高度 榴彈 變成了 非常 貧窮的航空母艦 有些 西班牙宣傳 喜歡稱它為 El Poderoso 很強的 很多船員 都喜歡 El Ponderoso Ponderous 或者像 一位 現代的 英國作家 所說 是 一艘 盆地的 航空母艦 因為 那些 高度榴彈 讓它 擴展得 比原本 要擴展的 海面空間 使得 它的 榴彈 變得 像 一艘 航空母艦 當然 你可以 改變 榴彈 或 擴展 榴彈 的方向 這意味著 試圖 改變 航線 會被 航空母艦 使得 它 航線 而 也使得 改變 航空母艦 軌道 與 要求 因為 它 是 更寬敞 的 航空母艦 它 是 一個 更寬敞 航空母艦 更寬敞 甚至一個相對較小的銷售損失和麪罩 幾乎無法啟動她 而那是在她嘗試與其他艦艇組織 這大概是幾年 從鄰近的船長的集體生命中 擔憂的是 究竟在哪裡 巨大的潛艇 將會下潛 而這就帶我們 到火力問題 新的槍架 包含了兩種武器 8寸長槍 和24寸長槍 8寸長槍 自然而然是很輕的武器 甚至輕到 即使是一艘航空母艦 它也可能無法 穿過一艘航空母艦的 重建旁邊 而且尺寸大約是4英寸 也無法配合 航空母艦的裝備 相似的重型槍 例如9寸長槍 在英國也存在 但通常只會有9寸長槍 在輕型航空母艦 通常是低級的 相似的高級武器 例如HMS Victory 通常在公開戰場 都是較強的12寸長槍 因此 使用更多的重量 費用和時間 配合8寸長槍 4寸長槍 配合更多的重量 就像是增加 航空母艦的超級結構 只要安裝一顆 0.22寸長槍 用來自衛 對付 可能是蜥蜴 24寸Obus 可能是更好的 方案 在英國軍隊 增強使用的 殼彈 例如 短槍 或輕型彈 通常在航空母艦 的高處 可以發射 24寸或32寸彈 有時甚至42寸彈 但在減少範圍 西班牙和法國 使用了短槍 叫Obus 或Obusier 在法國 這些 通常是更短 是鋼或鋼製造 雖然 相對輕量 但這相比 24寸Obus 仍然重3.25寸 基本上 這給了英國 一個好答案 但實際上 相對輕巧 非常短的彈 例如 輕型彈 大型彈 這些都在 短距離 現在你可能會想 1790年代的彈匣 是個好創新 確實是 但這些不是 彈匣 而是彈匣 所以 用彈匣 你必須先猜 最高的 目標 然後 祈禱 彈匣彈匣 彈匣 擊段 擺上 也是 騰空 而是因為沒有任何爆炸彈在Trafalgar Trafalgar有16個這樣的武器 所以Santissima Trinidad可能有些問題 但她的大尺寸,再次對抗她 她的尺寸太高,所以沒有機會在抵抗的航班行動中成功 因此,國民軍隊決定,正如他們在聖威廷戰爭中所做的那樣 簡單地打敗她,以一個像城堡般的方式 也就是從遠處發射大量的炮彈 這意味著Obus的船員 通常缺乏能力對敵人造成任何傷害 同時同時也受到敵人長槍的延長發射 將戰爭的船員削減到 如果任何的英國三艘船員 在戰爭後附和報告行動時 Obus的船員肯定不會有那麼多 這些問題的總結就是 在她的兩項重大戰爭後 她的重組成為四艘船 她在兩項戰爭中表現得非常差 在聖威廷戰爭中 她被殲滅,然後她的顏色被削減 除了由一艘較有道理設計的 西班牙第一艘和第三艘 搭載了大型船艦 當然,幾年後 她會出現在芝加哥 在陰晴的天氣下 Helmsman可能會放棄 因為她輕輕地前進 基本上失去控制 再次被殲滅 短暫被一群 HMS Africa的小64槍 看她是否願意放棄 然後再放棄 然後被淘汰 在戰爭後的暴風暴雨中 當然,在海洋保護方面 F級救援船 或潛艇救援船 這艘可憐的十艘船 經常被稱為船隊救援船 F級救援船 我稍後會稱為F級救援船 是一種奇怪的概念 一開始,甚至之前 它們是由一艘軍隊維持 讓它們能夠實現 幾乎任何任何的任務 從一艘小型船艦 裝載一艘超過能力的引擎 到完全失敗的整艘船 這確實是很大的錯誤 當然,沒有人會想重複這件事 對吧? 無論你信不信 F級救援船 的起源在於 為潛艇救援船提供救援 這艘是德國11英尺的重型軍艦 用來進行長距離的 汽油燃料貨幣攻擊 為什麼任何人都認為 他們需要或想要 一艘小型救援船 是另一回事 但無論如何 這意味著他們需要 達到德國航空總署和 Graf Spee的速度 這概念並不糟糕 但是 這意味著 一艘船要比 一艘破壞船還要大 才能配合長距離的汽油引擎 和或大量的燃料貨幣 肯定是大量的燃料貨幣 如果他們要求渦輪能力 還要有一個很深的洞 在遙遠的海洋中 他們就不需要 而是要有一個 很小的洞 在遙遠的海洋中 他們不需要 那麼大的洞 而是要有 一個很小的洞 他們不需要 那麼大的洞 而是要有 一個很小的洞 在遙遠的海洋中 ... . Destroyer allowance or being in breach of Article 8B which allowed for ships up to 2,000 tons but those ships were limited amongst other things to speeds of less than 20 knots This left the design team trying to square the circle of a ship which displaced around 700 tons was supposed to be able to hit 28 knots ... have a long range of operations in the deep sea . but also be a good minesweeper And also, you know, just as a side hobby provide a degree of anti-aircraft and anti-submarine defense To make at least a start on things the only way to get the tiny craft up to the speed necessary with the limited hull volume caused by a draft of just over 10 feet was to cram in a stupidly high-pressure power plant Most of the ships in the class would carry boilers that ran at no less than just over 1,600 psi With two given slightly sane at 1,000 psi units at a time when the U.S. Navy was considered to be operating particularly high-pressure boilers at what seems to be now a rather pedestrian 600 psi These boilers would send about 14,000 shaft horsepower which is about as much as a typical pre-dreadnought battleship's output And pre-dreadnoughts outmass these F-class boats by about 22 to 24 times through a pair of screws Onto this vessel was now slapped a handful of depth charges a pair of single 105mm guns one at each end capable of just enough elevation to make you think they could be used to engage aircraft but not really as well as two pairs of 37mm bolt-action anti-aircraft guns and a pair of single 20mm These were for the actual anti-aircraft work If the enemy was, of course, kind enough to approach at walking pace so that you could hand-load each of your 37mm rounds The entire thing was coordinated through a single 9-foot rangefinder and supportable units that you could pick up and run across the bridge with if the enemy aircraft happened to go to the other side of your ship Somewhere on the quarter deck somebody remembered yeah, there's supposed to be mine-sweeping gear here, isn't there? So they stuck a crane on to handle the sweeps A total of 17 ships were initially planned but as mentioned at the start you only ended up with 10 The others being replaced at least in theory were designed for 10 actual mine-sweepers Shockingly reports from the trials were not favorable Due to their small size and comically low freeboard especially when you looked at their bows the reports listed seaworthiness as just about adequate in a calm as in these ships would not immediately be at risk of sinking But outside of said flat calm most of the spray from the bow had a disturbing tendency to launch itself right at the bridge And above sea state 4 they were bobbing around so much that mine-sweeping was essentially impossible The anti-aircraft guns were also directly in the path of the near-constant shower of spray and thus were barely workable And thanks to the significantly greater resistance that resulted from all of this range was also insufficient for deep-ocean operations Something we'll come back to a bit later Oh yeah, and the machinery had two settings broken or putting out so much power that the hull started to warp slightly thus breaking everything else About the only bright spot was that when they were capable of moving their speed meant that they at least made passable sub-chases It was just a pity that their depth-charge loadout as designed was best described as a generous handful And so with a hopeful note that maybe in time they might not break down quite as much it was proposed to repurpose them as escorts for the faster merchant ships running nearby to Germany which is where much of the post-war designation issues as to what their actual role was supposed to be comes from Now on top of this came a final true tabulation of their capacity for range Now assuming that they moved at a reasonable speed as opposed to a slow efficient cruising speed they could stay out for a grand total of about three days Yeah, you ain't escorting a panzer ship on that kind of range After a consideration of trying to build an improved class it was concluded the whole idea was stupid and the role would be better built by older torpedo boats where you could just take off the aft guns and put anti-submarine equipment on there A final report assessed them in their four main roles In the fast escort role they were evaluated as too slow, too short range and had poor seakeeping in mild to rough weather As a minesweeper they were held to potentially be useful but their draft was too great which was a bit of a problem when you're sweeping mines For anti-aircraft use they were held to be too lively to be a stable gun platform And for anti-submarine work they were held to be potentially promising but they had no hydrophones or any other way of detecting a submarine installed Some efforts were made to fix the absolute worst of the problems Eventually the bows would be altered to reduce spray The aft 105mm gun and the 37mm guns were removed in the latter case replaced by two more 20mm And various other additional changes were made to individual ships when they were repurposed for specific tasks With this done they were all promptly exiled to Baltic duty which was the Kriegsmarine's way of saying this ship is incapable of being trusted in the open ocean where inevitably they would be joined by the Königsbergs The outbreak of war did see them briefly returned to Kiel but with the destruction of F9 at the hands of the submarine HMS Ursula and a string of mechanical issues by March 1940 not a single ship was operational and they'd spent so much of the intervening time adjacent to the pier outside Kiel Railway Station that they became known as the Barneshoff Flotilla or Station Flotilla Despite war needing pretty much every ship that floated to go out and do its duty the laundry list of issues that needed to be fixed on them to make them even halfway workable was so long that they were instead just flat out removed from front line services and spent most of the rest of the war in secondary roles mostly as tenders occasionally as training ships or torpedo recovery vessels on the U-boat exercise ranges and very occasionally some bright spark would bring them back for escort duty until something broke at which point everyone was reminded why they'd been taken off that duty in the first place Oh we have a bit of a theme developing around unsatisfactory seakeeping as we move into our third category the Cyclops-class coast defense ships Now described by some as the most unsatisfactory group of ironclads to ever fly the White Ensign the surprising thing is the Cyclops-class actually started out as a repeat of something that was quite successful the harbor defense ship Cerberus built for the state of Victoria in what would later become Australia The problem started in late 1870 The Russian Empire had taken advantage of the Franco-Prussian War to declare that it was denouncing and no longer following various clauses of the treaty which had brought an end to the Crimean War They'd never been particularly happy with that treaty anyway which was at least somewhat understandable since it had been negotiated under the multiple barrels of Anglo-French guns But they saw the Franco-Prussian War which France was not doing particularly well in as obviously occupying one of the two major powers they'd previously fought and they gambled that Britain which was getting a front-row seat to the two most powerful armies in Europe beating seven bells out of each other would likely be distracted and not want to risk going it alone with Crimean War Mark II ironclad boogaloo This in turn caused no end of debate in British political circles but the general reaction was actually quite aggressively against Russia redressing what Russia felt to be historical wrongs And that of course seemed to point to war because the Russians were at least initially not really giving in And although the Royal Navy was the largest navy on the planet the advent of steam ironclads in various forms meant that all new types of warfare were being dreamed up In particular the idea of Russian ironclads and other ships making a rapid passage from the Baltic to attack the British coast was envisaged by certain people The whole situation was described at the time by Spencer Robinson During the war scare of 1870 when there was a possibility of this country becoming involved and our port subjected to enemy attack the board had to consider the question of local coast defence against the kind of vessels and how they would be armed which would attempt the destruction of the large commercial and manufacturing towns which were situated on our coast No large, heavily armoured deep-drafted ships of war can approach the most defenceless of these harbours A serious attack would have to be made by light vessels probably a mixture of armoured and unarmoured ships And you will easily see that the superiority on all points rests with the class the Admiralty adopted as part of a system of coast defence The class he references would be the Cyclops class For reasons best known to themselves the Admiralty board decided that the best way to defend the entire coastline of the United Kingdom and its various ports was not to blockade the Russian fleet or blockade the exit from the Baltic or even try to intercept and destroy the slightly weird shallow-draft attack fleet as it might try and cross the North Sea But rather they preferred to quickly construct a small force of four coastal defence ships which would then be based along the coast and in theory able to sail to whichever ports the theoretical Russians happen to be going after In the interests of time and cost because they thought war could break out at any moment the Cerberus type was selected and four ships were laid down in September 1870 Cyclops, Gorgon, Hecate and Hydra Armament, armour and overall dimensions were pretty much identical to Cerberus But the earlier vessel had engines capable of just under 14,000 indicated horsepower which gave it a top speed of just under 10 knots It was decided to instead install new engines that averaged around 1,700 indicated horsepower although it varied per ship for a top speed of about 11 knots But these heavier engines led to the already small freeboard being reduced still further Collectively all the weight additions added almost a foot to the ship's draughts The slightly larger super structure that was installed didn't help in this case On top of that the new machinery turned out to need more mend to operate And so the overall result was a somewhat worse version of Cerberus with the essentially nonexistent freeboard liable to become awash in even the mildest sea or perhaps the passage of a particularly corpulent swan In and of itself this might not have been awful But considering that Cerberus was only expected to defend the harbour that she'd been sent to with special additional temporary breastwork being installed on her deck for open passage in the ocean And since there were more than four ports in the United Kingdom these ships would be expected to sail in the North Sea in any weather since of course attack could come at any time And thus they were designated coastal instead of harbour defence ships being expected to travel and then also possibly fight at sea combined with their already overloaded nature was a fool's errand And to be honest many at the time realised it with one admiral writing that the constructive department was ordered to build ships that could easily be run over in mid-ocean which could not possibly float in shallow water that could not go from one port to another except after careful study of the barometer that could go to the bottom readily in a very heavy seaway and in a variety of other ways and that possessed the smallest amount of offensive power and the maximum amount of defensive power That problem the constructive department has solved very faithfully and exceedingly cleverly in giving us coast defence ships which cannot defend our coasts And what on earth do coast defence ships mean anyway? Although cyclops entered the water only ten months after being laid down the war scare of 1870 was already dying down and so the ships took their sweet, sweet time about entering service since more serious warships now became something more of a priority A review into the class concluded that unless the weather was absolutely flat calm they should never leave the shelter of a harbour which completely negated the entire point of building them As such, they remained pretty much immobile in the various ports that they were completed in until the late 1880s when work was done to permanently extend the breast work out in a manner somewhat similar to the layout of HMS Devastation This provided more space aboard as well as more buoyancy and stability which allowed them to make safe sea passages on various exercises in the late 1880s and 1890s well after their utility had passed at which point they were essentially just serving to beef up the numbers before they were sent back into the reserves and scrapped in 1903 And now we come to well, the Saveski Soyuz Now, much as I criticise many German warship designs of the Second World War as inefficient at best and downright dangerous to their own crews at worst You have to admit they were working from a handicap of enforced stagnation in their design departments for just over a decade after the Versailles Treaty so some mistakes are to be expected Now, Soviet Russia Not only had serious warship design here collapsed earlier with the outbreak of dance-dance Russian Revolution but the various factions vying for power had much like the French Revolutionaries about 130 years earlier managed to either execute or force into exile a pretty good portion of the segment of society that made up the Russian Imperial Navy's officer and design cadres Civil War then saw the destruction of much of the industrial infrastructure that was needed to build and maintain ships and Lenin's government saw anything beyond coastal defence as a bourgeoisie concept oddly echoing the sentiments of some of the elements of very early US government And when Stalin came to power the purges began When interest in the Navy finally picked up again design was mired in numerous committees often with self-referential loops that went back over and over and over on themselves and it was all subject to the change at the whim of Stalin himself This complete detachment from reality meant that when new battleships were called for the smallest of them was sketched at 43,000 tonnes with the largest being a 75,000 tonner that would somehow carry no less than 16 17.7 inch or possibly 18 inch guns along with a 15 inch inclined belt and a speed of 26 knots even though it came with a note that Soviet industry couldn't actually produce a 15 inch thick slab of armour steel at that point but they hoped that just sticking two slabs together in roughly the same area should be fine in contravention of every engineering principle known to mankind I'm sure the Japanese who at that point were getting well stuck into their Yamato project would have had quite a good chuckle at reading that particular ship's design notes Drafts, proposals, specifications and sketches pinged back and forth and forth and back and back round again between at least five different design committees with notes about 20 inch and 21 inch guns and 20 inch thick belts being whispered about in certain circles before settling after quite a few ups and downs on something just under 60,000 tonnes with roughly speaking Yamato-like speed and protection but with nine 16 inch guns instead of nine 18.1 inch guns and all this for a nation's first battleship building attempt since the middle of World War I and the early Dreadnought period Stalin then happily launched another purge and most of the design teams promptly turned on each other with the survivors forging ahead with a series of ever increasingly interesting design decisions They decided for example to include a Russian version of the Italian Pugliese torpedo defence system and then only after the ships had actually started construction did they bother to do a comparative test to see if they were actually correct The Italian system required extremely fine precision workmanship to function properly and so unsurprisingly their bootleg copy fared much worse than either the original Italian system or the multi-layered system used elsewhere But since it was too late the ships continued with a torpedo defence system that probably would have failed the minute it was hit by any substantial torpedo Aerial bombing tests were then conducted on a target which concluded the deck armour needed to be moved up higher To mitigate against the effect on stability and because the belt armour would need to be taller and thus heavier the belt was thinned by about two and a half inches Only for the original thickness of the belt to later be ordered to be readopted with absolutely no mitigation for weight or stability included Model tests on the hull form showed a wide range of issues At certain speeds the bow wave series of crests and troughs along the side of the hull would expose the unarmoured hull below the belt It was decided this was clearly unpatriotic behaviour by the water and ignored The ship sat very heavily aft so they reduced the height of the belt armour in the aft area and removed the two aftmost heavy anti-aircraft turrets This mitigated but didn't entirely solve the trim problem and then the turrets were ordered to be installed back into the design later anyway again with no mitigation and so it went on The ships were ordered to be laid down before their final designs had actually even been finished and were supposed to enter service in about two and a half years which was an absurd target even for a country that actually knew what the heck it was doing Steel only arrived sporadically and much of it was of such low quality it was outright rejected even on a cursory visual inspection and it turned out that half the factories who were supposed to be building such minor things like the turbines, the boilers the propeller shafts and the gun turrets either didn't exist were incapable of conducting the work assigned to them or they could do it but they were extremely slow and then one of the ships had to be cancelled because they found that a lot of the rivets they used were completely substandard and would probably have failed shortly after she hit the water and that's just the edited highlights of the cavalcade of stupidity that was the Sovetsky-Soyuz design process all in all the German invasion leading to the halt of the project was probably a mercy for everyone involved as the cumulative list of issues meant that there was a non-insignificant chance of the ships managing to just sink themselves in bad weather if any of them had ever been completed and if they faced actual combat the skill on the enemy's part would have been in not hitting a weak point now after all that we come to USS Wasp and you might be thinking oh come on poor old Wasp can't possibly be that bad compared to Sovetsky-Soyuz and well you'd be right she wasn't but she still represented an engineering failure in the end albeit for reasons that are at least somewhat more understandable even if there were also some rather clear missed opportunities Wasp came about thanks to the naval treaty system USS Langley America's first aircraft carrier was being converted to a seaplane carrier and that meant that between her coming off the books as a carrier and the rounding up of odd tonnages from the Lexington's Ranger and York towns there was about 15,000 tons to play with in the US Navy's carrier tonnage allowance it was decided to therefore design a carrier which would use up every last one of those tons unfortunately two things immediately saddled the design the first was an overwhelming desire amongst many of the US Navy's higher ups to get the same or as close to the same capabilities air group wise as the larger York towns just on a smaller displacement and much like the Hatsuhara class destroyers in Japan it would turn out that could only be done with rather significant corner cutting practically everywhere else the other issue was that there was in theory a way out of this problem back when Lexington and Saratoga had been converted the US Navy had upon realizing how overweight they were going to be compared to the new treaty restrictions engaged in quite a bit of creative accounting and incorporated what was supposed to be a 3,000 ton allowance for mid-career upgrades into the ship's initial starting tonnage and then quietly shuffled under the carpet the fact that the two carriers came in even above that limit if you happen to look at them closely now no one had really challenged them on this and so in theory at least a similar trick could have been used to rack WASP up to essentially a repeat Yorktown with the serial numbers filed off and maybe a few aesthetic changes that looked like weight saving measures but this wasn't done instead the designers were told to forge ahead with a carrier that possessed a Yorktown scale air group on a hull that displaced somewhere between three quarters and four fifths as much oh and they had to start on all of this before Ranger commissioned before Yorktown's final design had even been completed so they had exactly zero real world feedback on how the various features that had been designed into the US Navy's purpose built carriers had actually worked in real life they started with a list of what they in theory would like to keep from the Yorktowns air group size anti-aircraft battery which included eight five inch dual purpose guns and operational range all went on that list now to be fair they did look at a number of options that defied this listing the first one maintained all these features but it turned out they had to sacrifice speed and almost all protection another kept up speed but they had to sacrifice the air group to do so another ended up with Yorktown levels of protection but cost massive amounts of speed and almost half the size of the air group and an attempt to boost the air group with partial protection was also made but that poor thing could only just about scrape in at twenty five knots it was also thought about using multi-level launching this was thought to either save weight by cutting back on the upper flight deck much as the early versions of Akagi and Kaga had done and Courageous and Glorious would continue to do or by just making the forward part of the hangar essentially fully open using negative spacing to save weight just how desperate the designers were for extra tonnage for their ship is evidenced by the fact they successfully lobbied in getting the three hundred and fifty tons worth of combined margins assigned to Yorktown and Enterprise to be transferred over to WASP before the Yorktowns were even fully built and it wasn't actually clear if they need that displacement and it turned out they actually did unsuccessful attempts also included asking for the flagship features of all previous carriers to be removed which would save a hundred to a hundred and fifty tons which could go on to WASP with the flagship role then being transferred over to Cruisers as well as the removal of the eight inch gun turrets from both of the Lexingtons with the tonnage from the U.S.'s total allowance being allocated to WASP it was also suggested to make the ship like Ranger and perhaps only carry fighters and dive bombers which would eliminate the need for the larger torpedo bombers as well as the torpedo storage and handling facilities entirely although it was clear that speed was going to have to drop in some manner twenty five knots was felt to be unacceptably slow just over twenty nine knots was considered a minimum now this all added up to reverting essentially back to that original list of keeps with Admiral King asking if perhaps if they exchanged some of the proposed catapults or some deck armor and torpedo protection would this be possible to make the ship a little bit better protected now the designers to be fair to them did do their best they placed the magazines as low as they could in the ship taking them entirely below the water line and adding some deck armor above both the magazines and the aviation fuel tanks in theory this should offer a modicum of protection against bombs and shells but it also moved these facilities right into the prime target zone of torpedoes and mines now at first it seemed that although anti-torpedo protection was thought to be completely out of the question an armor belt and some more armor decking might be able to be incorporated to cover the machinery spaces and the belt extended to also cover the magazine this would offer at least some protection from more distant blast effects if not entirely against directly acting ones like torpedo strikes but as the design went on this feature had to be deleted although interestingly an STS steel backing plate was fitted in its place apparently with a view to using this to install an armor belt onto the ship anyway if war happened to come because then the treaties could be ignored however the primary aim of all these protection rearrangements was to guard against shell fire which was still thought to be the major threat and for all that Wasp still came out almost a thousand tons over her target design weight seven hundred tons over her final design weight and almost fifteen hundred tons over the initial design weight before all the weight reallocation shenanigans from the other ships were factored in at the absolute last minute attempts were made to modify her power plant to reach almost thirty one knots but the cost of doing this in both time and money was seen as far too great and the idea was quietly dropped unfortunately of course this meant that when she was sent to the Pacific which was a theater she was initially kept from because of concerns about her vulnerability in order to replace carriers which had been sunk whilst carrying much more comprehensive protection systems what happened to her was almost inevitable her ability to operate an exceptionally large air group for a ship of her displacement meant precious little to a submarine and to be perfectly blunt in nineteen forty two even against Japanese carrier aircraft strikes the large air group was of questionable value until the coming of HMS Victorious aka USS Robin managed to sort out the US Navy's fighter control and direction situation and so with a lot of planes and some marginal protection against incoming shell fire it was a trio of Japanese torpedoes from the submarine I-19 which blew massive holes in her side and then started a series of huge gasoline fires and explosions which would doom the ship over the course of the next half hour or so in retrospect a carrier operating maybe fifty to sixty aircraft with a working torpedo defense system or just a slightly rules-lawyered Yorktown repeat would have been a far better idea fifty to sixty aircraft on a carrier that survives is still far better than ninety on one that explodes although to be perfectly fair to wasp three Type 95 torpedoes might well have put down a Yorktown just as well but at least there almost certainly would have been fewer fatalities and the possibility of the ship surviving if it wasn't directly hit on the aviation gasoline tank but that's it for this video let me know what you think what other ships you think might fit onto a list like this obviously bearing in mind we have covered ten others in the first video of this type and thanks very much for watching let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry dock questions