Originally posted by spence
I read "A Glorious Way to Die" (or title similar to that) written by one of the officers on Yamato when she was sunk. He points out some flaws in her design which contributed mightily to her demise. The first was the concentration of flak on the superstructure. When the Americans attacked they sent in waves of F6Fs strafing and dropping anti-personnel bombs which slaughtered the guncrews. He describes literal waterfalls of blood flowing down on to the main deck from the gun tubs above.
The second major flaw was a longitudinal bulkhead with no or at least very few piping penetrations which prevented the Yamato from counterflooding effectively once the TBFs followed the fighters and started putting holes in her side with torpedoes.
I doubt these deficiencies are modelled in any way in the game though.
I'm not sure but I may have put the Yamato out of action in one of my PBEM games with just a couple of bombs. I know she's not really hurtin but the smoke was pretty heavy when the planes left and she's not been heard from since though lots of the crowd she was hanging around with have been by to say hello.
No, no way to really simulate specific design traits in a game of the scale of UV (or WitP), so no TDS faults for Yamato or SoDak etc etc.
BB comments (oh yeaaaahh......
)Yamato did incorporate a large longitudal bulkhead that effectively halved the ship into port and starboard sides. This feature was eliminated from post WWI British and American designs for the reason mentioned......promoting a tendancy for damaged ship's to list. Then again, depending on your point of view....it can be seen as a good or bad thing....ask the DC officer (or radio officer....been a while since i read Spurr's excellent book) whose life was saved by the bulkhead when a 1000lb GP bomb exploded on the other side of it.
It was thought that Yamato's pumping capacity would help compensate for any issues with list, but this turned out to be erronious, not to mention moot given all the incoming that was heading her way.
In fairness, the US preference for huge machinary spaces for the NC/SD and Iowa class also had it's fobiles, while listing would have been marginal there was serious question as to how much bouyancy reserves they would have if two of these spaces filled completely. Concerns over this probably influenced the unbuilt Montana class, the true successor to the SoDak class, which featured much greater subdivision of the engineering spaces.
The concentration of AA guns was not really a "flaw" in such due to the fact that the nature of her main armament forced this move on the Japanese part. Such was the blast effect of these guns that no AAA mount could placed to close to them without being heavily shielded (wartime necessity did end up their placing of a few nearby.....Spurr's book gave a pretty good description of what it was like to be near those guns when they went off!!) As such it was a weakness, but there was not much that could be done about it. Of far greater concern was the lack of punch the 25mm weapon produced and lack of proximity fused shells.
Yamato contained a third flaw.......shared by her cousins in the USN.....defective joint connecting the lower armor belt with the anti-torpedo bulkhead. This often failed as highlighted earlier in the war when a torpedo hit allowed water to flood a handling room in Turret III.
All flaws aside though, the Yamato class remained immensly tough as attested during Musashi's destuction, an unmatched preformance not to mention a rare gold star preformance by a dedicated DC team aboard a warship belonging to a navy that often scores poorly in this dept.
It was that experience, along with the hopelessness of her situation, not to mention the simple fact that the day of the BB as Queen of the Sea was long over
, that doomed Yamato the most. 300+ late war aircraft vs 1 BB, no matter how powerful can only have one result.Having learned from their experiences with her sister, USN gunners aimed to place as many torpedoes along one side of the hull as they could, the effect of which is that Yamato, while still tough, proved easier to cripple and dispatch than her sister did, exaserbated by the longitudal bulkhead, esaserbated by the inadequancy of the counterflooding mechinisms for the bilge pumps (at one point a "good torpedo" on the starboard was a welcome relief)
A last factor, often unmentioned was the USN conversion to the much more powerful Torpex, originally a British invention, instead of TNT for their torpedoes. These powerful weapons ensured that even if Yamato hadn't had the "flaw" in her TDS, that much damage and compromising of bouyancy reserves would have occured in the face of many torp hits.
An ill conceived plan that acomplished nothing but the wasting of hundreds of lives. Spurr's book was sobering, not to mention disquieting in it's stark description of the brutality that had become commonplace on both sides of the fence by this stage of the game. .
Still, in the end, the design did live up to conservative estimates in regards to torpedoes. Away from my source but i believe the class was designed to be able to take at least 5 to 6 torpedo hits and still remain operational for the decisive battle. More than that and it became a matter of survival and getting back to port. Torps were always the most dangerous and unpredictible weapon to account for in BB design thought. (it is estimated that even late in the game vs Musashi, that 80% of her citidal area was still intact in spite of all the hits)
Shinano is a completely different story. Incomplete, with ill-trained caretaker crew aboard.....she had no business being at sea and paid the price for it. Had she been fully operational and manned, barring a lucky hit to avGas storage, she would have weathered her hits.