history

[mint quiver]

The Russian planners are up there with IJN in terms of Strategic Genius

[vocal coral]

I'll just remind you that different branches of the armed forces were subordinate to different commands, and the airborne forces, for example, which was deployed in Gostomel, literally had orders to take it by storm, and not just stop by

[mint quiver]

War is war

[vocal coral]

War is special military operation

[mint quiver]

Anyway end of the discussion

i dont want to get into politics because thats illegal

[vocal coral]

that's why there was clowning, because even legally it is difficult to understand that it is

[vocal coral]

That's history already

[cyan oriole]

the Japanese had 0 chances the second Pearl Harbor "succeeded"

with the benefit of hindsight, Pearl Harbor was the greatest disaster for the Japanese in the entire war

[vocal coral]

As you wish, I was just telling you what I know

[cyan oriole]

it's like when you play chess and someone makes a dumb move, and the computer evaluation goes from "even" to "forced mate in 3" and the bar goes whooop

old analysis (by a relative amateur), but still pretty accurate
https://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm

now, his BB ranking is total dogshit, although it comes to the right conclusion through luck

he was missing many of the pieces of knowledge needed to make the right judgements

[vocal coral]

[remote monolith]

overall PH is just one big strategical mistake that should have never been done in the first place, but the Japanese by that point was already assuming it WILL have to go to war with the US and thinking HOW they should do it, when they should have been thinking of SHOULD they do it at all

[remote monolith]

aye I remember combinedfleet

[cyan oriole]

ironically, if the Japanese didn't do Pearl Harbor, and just carried out a surprise attack on the Philippines, they maybe had a chance

[remote monolith]

less valuable these days, but afaik the production ramp up still hold up

[cyan oriole]

the American public didn't care about the Philippines nearly as much as an attack on the mainland US

[vocal coral]

The Japanese wanted to be like the Germans in France, but it turned out

[cyan oriole]

wait? not in my IJN

minor tactical flaws that don't change the fact the war was made 100% unwinnable on Dec 7 1941

[vocal coral]

@remote monolith Don't you have a complete list of German ships from World War II ?

[remote monolith]

no?

[vocal coral]

Why

[remote monolith]

I never cared much about the Kriegsmarine surface fleet

I mean there's the wiki I guess

[vocal coral]

Why ...

Okay ...

[mint quiver]

Excel spreadsheet is the easiest way to win an argument

[vocal coral]

Yes

[cyan oriole]

cuz the Vietnam war was in some backwater for the cause of French colonialism

[vocal coral]

I just can't find a proper list of the German fleet anywhere

[remote monolith]

like, the surface fleet was such an insignificant part of the greater war they did jack shit on both Dragoon and Overlord despite the presence of Kriegsmarine units on standby nearby

[cyan oriole]

the Pacific War was against a power that launched a suprise attack on the US mainland and kill thousands of Americans. Nothing short of unconditional surrender would be accepted

[cyan oriole]

ah yes, transport #1, transport #2, transport #3, etc

big if true

[mint quiver]

You can probably remember all the names of the German Capital ships

[remote monolith]

then again I said "units" I meant "a bunch of small torp boats that had no conceivable hope of challenging a gigantic naval-landing armada"

[mint quiver]

which is not a good thing

[cyan oriole]

if you want every major warship of the KM, you can compile it from wikipedia, although you will have to find loss dates yourself

[vocal coral]

I mean, with those ships whose construction has been started but not completed ...

[cyan oriole]

you can probably remember the names of all the German subs and DDs too

not hard to count to 57

[mint quiver]

[cyan oriole]

https://tenor.com/view/true-feel-that-thats-true-gif-7410050725709839510

[vocal coral]

You can just remember the number of the first German submarine and the last one

[remote monolith]

you can definitely memorize the more hilariously blundering one

[vocal coral]

[remote monolith]

Leberecht Maas got sunk by the Luftwaffe for example

[mint quiver]

German destroyer fleet was a comedic relief

Scharnhorst and Gniesnau,Eugen i think were the only ones that actually had respectable service history

[cyan oriole]

no, that just means the US diverts resources from Europe

[remote monolith]

tfw half the available Destroyer fleet got completely wrecked at Narvik

[mint quiver]

Meanwhile Bismarck Rudder

Tirptiz = Raf Target Practice#1

[cyan oriole]

and even then, if Japan sunk the entire Pacific and Atlantic fleets without somehow suffering major defeats (literally impossible), you still have to beat the 3000 black carriers of FDR

[remote monolith]

I meant that Japan would have to literally, magically, just zap entire US fleets from existence the moment they enter the pacific

like, they just got out of the Panama Canal and some fucking laser beam just vaporize them all

and repeat it 12 times

[mint quiver]

Wasnt that their plan in essence

[cyan oriole]

remember that the US was actually cutting down on ship production because of the steel shortage in around 1943, it would have been worse if the US decided that ship production needed to continue

[cyan oriole]

unironically yeah

"a sighted enemy is the equivalent of a dead enemy" - IJN saying

aka "nah, I'd win"

[remote monolith]

they were clearly planning to have this chap do the job but he was a no show

[mint quiver]

Mark Felton Productions: Hirohito secret mech

[cyan oriole]

Germans had their wunderwaffe, but they were no match for the folded 1000 times supersamurai of Japan

[vocal coral]

Poor Japanese

[cyan oriole]

Eugen's service history is sitting AFK in port I believe

[vocal coral]

They didn't have a thousand mines with normal steel ...

[cyan oriole]

Graf Spee was luck enough to die a hero before it had to sit afk in port like the rest

[remote monolith]

Scheer had a decent run

[cyan oriole]

same for Bismarck, Bismarck would not be remembered if it survived and then (you guessed it) sat in port being bombed for 3 years

[remote monolith]

which is funny because almost nobody even remember her despite being literally the only Panzerschiff that did a decent job

[cyan oriole]

cuz Wehraboos' only knowledge of the Kreigsmarine is the Bismarck

and maybe they have heard of Prinz Eugen because Rheinubung

[mint quiver]

Welp from what i remember it had much better history compared to the rest of the class

[cyan oriole]

Gneisenau? Tirpitz? I don't know those names, only the Sabaton song ship

[mint quiver]

Especially looking at Blucher

[vocal coral]

One raid, one battle, one run, and cannon ship on Baltic

[cyan oriole]

not a fair comparison, Norwegian coastal batery was operated by legendary viking warriors blessed by Thor with Norse powers

https://tenor.com/view/yep-pepe-pepe-yep-gif-18726156

[remote monolith]

mfw Austria-Hungary managed to score another win 2 decades after it imploded

[vocal coral]

The most productive of all the Hipper-class ships is, oddly enough, Admiral Hipper himself

[mint quiver]

I think the U-Boots carried the KM too hard

[cyan oriole]

miklos horthy waking up one night to see: "Kill Assist x 1000"

[mint quiver]

That it carried to their surface navy

[cyan oriole]

well with the benefit of hindsight again, there should not have been a surface navy

only time it was used was Weserubung, but it was not at all suited to the task

and suffered severe losses

[vocal coral]

The Germans are stuck in a position where they seem to need a surface fleet, but they don't seem to need it

That's why the entire German fleet is unique and a bit clownish

[mint quiver]

I mean they didint expect the WW2 to start like it did

[cyan oriole]

basically, they either had to go all out on Plan Z and delay the war (which makes them lose), or give up Norway (which makes them lose), or stay OTL (which makes them lose)
we notice a pattern yet? it's moot

[mint quiver]

but then Reader was much more politically connected than Donitz

[cyan oriole]

don't ask why Hipper is 14000 tons for a ship with the on-paper combat capability inferior to 10000 ton cruisers

[vocal coral]

Well, it's just that most of the ships of the surface fleet were still projects of 1930-33, when there was still no plan to subjugate the WHOLE of Europe

[cyan oriole]

(it's cuz redundancy to always make it back when raiding)

[vocal coral]

and a major regional power, as if it were necessary to have a fleet, this is the law

[remote monolith]

Hitler definitely planned some vague thing for European domination since at least 1923 if his rambling of a book is to be believed

[cyan oriole]

Hitler was also not in power yet

[mint quiver]

Germans were better than Japanese because when they did something stupid then they actually tried to do something more reasonable

but at that point it was too late anyway

[cyan oriole]

the Reichsmarine were the ones who started rearmament, Hitler just ramped it up with the KM

[vocal coral]

You're saying that like the German government and leadership are just Hitler himself

[cyan oriole]

Weimar wanted to become a major power once more, and the navy was a part of that. They were the ones who started cheating on the treaty (although Adolf was the one who made it blatant)

[mint quiver]

Generally Poland was apparently the last piece of German teritorial expansion

probably

[cyan oriole]

no??

Hitler had many more plans after Poland, but the war started

[mint quiver]

Well to the USSR

[cyan oriole]

obviously, the final stage was the "greater germanic reich" or whatever those autists working with Himmler came up with

[mint quiver]

But in terms of asking the territorial concessions from the allies

[remote monolith]

wallahi Hyperborea

(even Hitler think this is nuts)

[cyan oriole]

https://tenor.com/view/true-feel-that-thats-true-gif-7410050725709839510

[mint quiver]

Himmler was that quiet weird kid of Third Reich

that writes fanfics in his notebook

[cyan oriole]

I mean even Adolf was out of it

[mint quiver]

Bro probably thought "Shit what did i put myself into"

[cyan oriole]

it takes some special mental illness to want world domination I guess

[vocal coral]

Mussolini chilling with Hitler pov

[mint quiver]

Goofy ass cartoon evil

[cyan oriole]

when you think about it, yeah

[mint quiver]

Dr Adolf Doofenschmirtz

[cyan oriole]

"I'm going to become KING OF THE WORLD and kill everyone who doesn't look like me!!!" feels cartoonish

[mint quiver]

It feels like shounen villan

WW2 anime when

[cyan oriole]

but somehow, this cartoon guy managed to take the throne of a great power, and now things are real

[mint quiver]

but Leaders are anime girls

[cyan oriole]

I think that exists

[remote monolith]

they really are just cartoon villains, and honestly its pretty fucking terrifying when you consider they were also seriously planning stuff like ovens that runs solely on human fat to mass cremated corpses and special chambers to make killing an industrial process

[mint quiver]

He had power of meth and luck on his side

[cyan oriole]

wouldn't surprise me at least

meth explains a lot

"Mussolini we need to cook!"

[mint quiver]

Mein Waifu is the Fuhrer ?

[cyan oriole]

there are some holocaust jokes from there actually, I will stop

[remote monolith]

like, I saw some people wondering why Holocaust got talked about the most among genocides, and its partly because Nazi Germany was quite literally the only nation state to ever attempt to make genocide a clinical process no different that a factory worker clocking in to work his shift

[mint quiver]

Albeit the facts Japs got the free pass

is kinda iffy

[remote monolith]

you get in, work the chambers, tell the sonderkommandos to "dispose of the goods", you clock out

[vocal coral]

Aem...

British...?

South Africa, the Boeres...

The British were the first to come up with the concept of concentration camps and systematize them

[remote monolith]

I don't remember the British doing industralized genocides, nor any western powers. Nor do I remember any of them making special government wings literally only with the task of doing genocides, making tools to make genocides easier, and normalizing genocides as a job

[mint quiver]

USSR kinda did

but again it also was a totalitarian shithole

[vocal coral]

There were labor camps in the USSR

[cyan oriole]

eh, USSR was more of the "work yourself to death", not the gas and ovens kind

[mint quiver]

Holdomor?

[cyan oriole]

more brutality than malice

[remote monolith]

like, this is not at all war crime olympics, I do think all genocides are equally horrific, all I'm saying is the holocaust was unique in how far the Germans tried to normalize killing thousands of people at once

[cyan oriole]

I wouldn't call that industrialized either

[vocal coral]

The difference between labor camps and concentration camps is that some are aimed at forced labor, while others are aimed at systematic extermination

[cyan oriole]

it takes a lot of planning, but mass starvation is messy compared to what Hitler did

[remote monolith]

they found out people just breaks down after the 15,000th peasant they shoot this week no matter how racist people were

so they came up with the gas chamber to disassociate soldiers from actually doing the stuff, thereby preventing mental breakdowns

[vocal coral]

The Holodomor was on the territory of the entire USSR, it was primarily due to the need for grain exports and 3 lean years

[mint quiver]

But the fact is that a lot of shit Japan or USSR did was tad bit swept under the rug

[remote monolith]

at least about Japan, not in this joint

not in my area for sure

mostly because here we got the full brunt of Japanese savagery

[vocal coral]

Well, let me also remind you about the sanctions from the United Kingdom and the United States on the USSR that are usually not mentioned at all

[mint quiver]

In the west i think that the things the Soviets and Japanese did are not really that exposed in the history books

[remote monolith]

oh for sure

[mint quiver]

I mean here ofc we do shit on USSR for their crimes as well as Germans

[remote monolith]

since those events happened relatively far away in less accessible areas

[mint quiver]

But i hate how Westerners have straight up clay ears when you talk to them sometimes about what USSR did

[remote monolith]

like, the full extent of the Holodomor did not get revealed until 1991 along with a bunch of other things, and given the public is just way behind in terms of catching up with Academia

[vocal coral]

this is normal, French textbooks do not mention, for example, the history of Vichy and the Munich agreement

[remote monolith]

we still have to continuously remind people that Sealion had no reasonable chance of Success, and that shit was debunked in the 70s

[vocal coral]

and why would anyone in the West want the history of the USSR and Eastern Europe ?

[mint quiver]

Man i a Wehraboo i still cant laugh how much people Dr.Goebbels is straight up fooling todays

He really was the propaganda goat

[cyan oriole]

and yet somehow, the farms owned by foreigners were untouched

German-owned farms in the USSR operated with no loss of efficiency

while Ukrainians starved

how does that work

[remote monolith]

man was damn good at the whole Propaganda thing admittedly

[mint quiver]

I always laugh when they compare something to him

like damn you aint no propaganda master

[vocal coral]

Russians and Belarusians, Kazakhstanis and Tajiks were also starving

[mint quiver]

Shit you still have people screaming how good German tank design was

XD

except it wasnt

[cyan oriole]

tbf, the West goebbled Goebbel's propaganda after the war too, to make themselves look better

[vocal coral]

To be honest, I've never even heard of it

Like

[mint quiver]

I think East too

[vocal coral]

Never

Where does this information come from ?

[mint quiver]

I generally think that both sides did really inflate how strong the Germans were to make themselves look better

[remote monolith]

speaking of the east gobbling German propaganda, this was my hometown

[mint quiver]

Ok how about i tell you that GDR literally gobbled up the Gestapo to form the stasi on the side

It wasnt only the west that did get the former Third Reich officials

[vocal coral]

The only thing I found on the topic of Germans at all is this article, which says that the population of Volga Germans suffered a lot ...

https://wolgadeutsche.net/library/item/665

[mint quiver]

Diffrence between the West and the East was pretty much like this

[vocal coral]

and the Western side was much more willing to hire former SS officers, who, for example, were simply hanged in the USSR

[mint quiver]

West: Tiger was the strongest tank we faced but against all odds we defeated it

East: Tiger was the strongest tank we faced but ours were stronger than it

You can see it in Movies

[vocal coral]

Otto Scorceni is a meme

[remote monolith]

"ITS A FUCKING TIGER RUN"

actually a PzIV

[mint quiver]

• but also T34 STRONKEST TONK OF THE WORLD

it wasnt bad

[vocal coral]

It's funny that in the first battle of the Tigers II, 3 of them were shot from the T34-85 into the side

[remote monolith]

never fail to make me laugh that the first deployment of Tiger IIs in the east ended with like 3 of them completely disabled by a bunch of T-34s

yeah

[vocal coral]

Yeah

[mint quiver]

I did not say that T-34 was bad

[vocal coral]

The same thoughts, how cute

[mint quiver]

i mean 76 was mid at best

85 was pretty decent

[remote monolith]

I do feel the pendulum swung too far recently thanks to recent events that people ended up saying the T-34 was an utterly dogshit tank again

[mint quiver]

I still remember when the documentaries on history channels were saying that T-34 was the best tank of war

SLOPED ARMOR!

WOAH

LOOK

[vocal coral]

The T 34 was a tank with terrible ergonomics, and low crew survival after penetration

[remote monolith]

its kinda like returning to the 2000s where a lot of people did believe T-34s couldn't even fight a PzIV

[mint quiver]

Thats a staple of Russian tank design

[vocal coral]

but just with an indestructible suspension, trouble-free engine and armor that could hold the PaK 38

[mint quiver]

ironically even today

they never learn huh

[remote monolith]

for some reason Soviet and Russian tankers often falls on the smaller side of things

so their tanks are also cramped af

BMPs too iirc, shit was uncomfortable

[mint quiver]

I mean i can say that all Soviet designs were good but also shit

and lets not talk about BMDs

[vocal coral]

is it because you need comfort, or so that the car can survive a nuclear explosion ?

[mint quiver]

Mainly because after T-64 they are kinda stuck with it

same with BMP1

It was good when it came out

[vocal coral]

I recently climbed into an BTR-90, which is the most uncomfortable shit I've been in.

[mint quiver]

but then they just started pumping the iterations of said vehicles

and by the time we have rn they are outdated shitboxes

[remote monolith]

also the T-34 suffered a lot from uneven productions in that different factories has wildly different outputs so one plant would produce the finest example of T-34s with uber good reliability, and the other would pump out unevenly built tanks that didn't even get sloped right

[vocal coral]

like it's comfortable, but I don't understand why such a height, you literally break your legs if you jump at full speed in harness

[mint quiver]

I remember one excerpt about the fogging of the gunner sight

or the quality of steel

welding

etc

welp it was shit

But mainly early war

Then it kinda improved

[remote monolith]

yeah, a lot of it was partly cause well, these factories just got moved and they need shit out NOW

[mint quiver]

Thats a fact

[vocal coral]

each factory has a unique T34

[mint quiver]

But still then you have people screaming that the Soviets would defeat Germany alone with no outside help alone

Which itself is propaganda

[vocal coral]

somewhere additional armor was welded, somewhere landing handles, somewhere suspension was changed, somewhere controls

[mint quiver]

I mean it was 1.skilled labour 2.quality of material 3.avilability of said material 4.industrial park

etc

Especially since they needed to push production targets

Which ended in cutting corner

[vocal coral]

considering that there were mostly children and women in the factories

[mint quiver]

where you would have "Tank" at the end

And then you had an explanation for Soviet armored losses

during the war

[remote monolith]

sometimes literally

[mint quiver]

So you had a situation where you would much more sit in the PZ-4 Ausf F1 than the T-34

[remote monolith]

I definitely remember reading about some particular Soviet factories that were a bit too literal about the phrase "corner cutting"

[mint quiver]

They really were onto that

they didnt care about what they do just how many

I mean you had smilar troubles in the aviation

well everything was fucked up

from the ground up

you could say the LL saved em in that period

literally

[vocal coral]

After 1942, very clear GOST directives began to be issued, which largely solved these problems

[mint quiver]

And again one of more reasons why people underestimate the LL

[vocal coral]

for example, the same problem was with the PPSH-41 early series, until 1942, up to half of the submachine guns were defective

[mint quiver]

The people think that soviets were just shitting out late production variants of T-34 etc

Third is the fact that they didnt that much need to produce anything other than war equipment

Which again helped to replace losses

[vocal coral]

People underestimate one very small tank, which, by the way, has the victory in the Battle of Prokhorov on its shoulders

T-70

[mint quiver]

Soviet light tanks are pretty much unknown in popular culture

And the propaganda usually focused on T-34 and IS series

same with German propaganda

[vocal coral]

Let me remind you that in the battle for the village of Prokhorovka, the Soviet corps numbered 300 T70 and 200 t34. And these tanks were going to the well-prepared positions of the infantry fighting vehicles and German tanks

[mint quiver]

I mean do you remember the last time you heard about M8 Greyhound for example ?

outside tank autists

or military autists

[vocal coral]

Never

[mint quiver]

exactly

same case here

Stuart arguably is popular because of Pacific

[vocal coral]

Zippo

Or

M8

[mint quiver]

Same with the navy

Destroyers rare/Subs rare Crusiers maybeeeeeeeeeeee

BBs and CVs always

Then you have Wehraboos

its always Tiger/Tiger 2

Sometimes Panther

Pz4 too

Pz3 and 2

rare

[vocal coral]

Did you know that the first Soviet ship to receive the title of Guards was the most terrible project of its time, the "Red Caucasus" ?

[mint quiver]

One thing i know Soviet Navy for

is pursuing shit designs

i mean Tsarists too

[vocal coral]

Yes

[vocal coral]

Gangut class is okay

[mint quiver]

Welp leave ship production to Briish and Muricans i guess

Cuckznetsov moment

[cyan oriole]

nobody cares about cruisers, DDs are more popular

and subs are super popular

[mint quiver]

I mean outside autist circles

more like pop culture

[cyan oriole]

sub, BB, and CV, coincidentally the 3 busted classes in wows

cuz they are the only classes the spenders understand

[mint quiver]

I play WT naval more tbh than WoWs

because Scharnhorst is busted XD

[cyan oriole]

isn't WT naval a hellhole?

[mint quiver]

Well i have most broken BB in a game

[cyan oriole]

??? tf did Kuznetsov do

[mint quiver]

Existed

[cyan oriole]

he was the best that the USSR could ever have hoped for

[mint quiver]

Welp its production i guess was the most lucky thing that happened to it XD

[cyan oriole]

the navy's champion against Stalin, and the counterweight to the old guard

oh you mean the ship

[mint quiver]

i mean the Carrier

btw

[cyan oriole]

not the guy

[mint quiver]

yep

[vocal coral]

Aeee....

You need to try it

[mint quiver]

[vocal coral]

It are very peculiar ...

[timber linden]

Wows is pretty trash

[mint quiver]

Naval in WT is a money printer

on lower brs

On top-tier it is which team has more Scharnhorsts

I think only Japanese ships do anything against it

Actually yeah i got killed by IJN Yamashiro

as a revenge tho

And regarding pop culture

lets not talk about Yamato

[vocal coral]

I have only hipper

[mint quiver]

or we will summon a force of 10000 Weebs trying to defend it

[vocal coral]

Because hipper based ultra cool

[mint quiver]

Hipper is my second fav ship

[vocal coral]

Yeeahh

[mint quiver]

And also Eugen players are braindead

literally clinically dead

[vocal coral]

True

Azur lane fans

Big booba eugen braindead fans

Fucking t9

[mint quiver]

Tsundere supremacy

i do agree

[vocal coral]

Yes

Only tsundere supremacy

[vocal coral]

The Italian players are also very strange

[mint quiver]

99% they are Naval Autists

or Italians

[vocal coral]

perhaps because the people who generally choose Italy in this game are strange

[mint quiver]

Like Femboys and Sweden

[vocal coral]

What ?

[mint quiver]

Yes

Majority of Femboys i know main Sweden

[vocal coral]

Bruh ahh moment

[mint quiver]

And i have been proven that its not a myth

[vocal coral]

I'm a Sweeden main

[mint quiver]

Welp into the rabbit hole you go

[vocal coral]

USSR, Germany and Sweden, the three main nations of this game

I have all the Soviets and the Germans too

[mint quiver]

I'm German main

[vocal coral]

Su 30 and Su 34 supremacy

Yes and aviation too

Grippen one love

[mint quiver]

https://tenor.com/view/jojo-jojos-bizarre-adventures-the-best-in-the-world-guns-gif-15566867

[vocal coral]

I still can't find the time to research the typhoon

[mint quiver]

Hol up bro

#other-games

or offtop

[vocal coral]

Oki

[cyan oriole]

copium

the dev and the balance may suck, but the game is great

and neither the dev nor the balance are worse than WT naval

[cyan oriole]

I haven't seen any weebs try to defend it

[mint quiver]

I can wish

[cyan oriole]

only random guys who are like "well I think Yamato is the strongest based off of vibes (no citation given)"

[mint quiver]

I love these people

[mental tapir]

Holy history channel so alive

[cyan oriole]

https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldOfWarships/comments/1jbvlx5/just_to_see_if_this_can_be_settled_a_little_bit/

this thread was pretty funny

[mint quiver]

Starting shit and keeping it alive is my speciality

[eternal veldt]

any argument about Iowa vs Yamato is invalid when a professional paper written and published on Warships International in 1986 sums the argument up pretty well that both wil cripple one another to the point that they could not rejoin the war effort feasibly before 1945

Get in line, armchair admirals

[cyan oriole]

I mean, you could also get a North Cape situation where somehow one managed to impair the other so much early on thatno damage is received

[eternal veldt]

Its a toss up is the conclusion of the paper, or both are incapacitated

In which case, any argument is moot because you need X conditions to be met for the victor to be created

https://www.jstor.org/stable/44889021

[maiden citrus]

the immune zone for both ships vs each other are extremely similar, and both within the range of the ships to hit each other somewhat reliably, more so for iowa due to better equipment, but, it is correct to say it is probably a tossup, as the area where one ship can hurt the other and the other is mostly safe is such an incredibly small band (like 1,000 yards) as to essentially be luck

[cyan oriole]

yeah, I think the article was assuming parity between American and Japanese armor, which created a bit of inaccuracy

and BB engagements aren't just a comparison of immune zones, often they can be decided without a single shell hitting the citadel

look at Bismarck vs PoW for example, both damaged each other to the point they each had to be recalled home, but the vital spaces were never damaged

[maiden citrus]

right, just as far as a decisive hit, it's probably going to be luck

their stats in function are extremely similar

[eternal veldt]

Bismarck is a mission kill, but Prince of Wales continued to shadow Bismarck until she did the 360 turn to break off with Prince Eugen.

Getting slammed in the bridge though, rather unfortunate and unlucky.

[cyan oriole]

tbf, Bismarck's mission was way different from Wales's

[maiden citrus]

iowa has some advantages, but not enough to where I wouldn't call it luck

[cyan oriole]

Bismarck's mission was to conduct raiding operations over a few months, so an otherwise inconsequential hit for any other BB in any other role was suddenly crippling

[eternal veldt]

The problem is that the premise for Iowa vs Yamato is often on whether the opposition can be sunk

And ignoring everything else including fleet composition and fleet missions, all of which are core to deciding who "wins" an engagement

[cyan oriole]

true
I mean yeah they can be sunk with luck, but more likely is some form of inconclusive engagement

[eternal veldt]

Realistically, Iowa dictates the terms of engagement

[cyan oriole]

and then after that, Yamato has to endure 1-3 airstrikes

[maiden citrus]

"who wins in a 1v1, tennessee or california"

[eternal veldt]

Situation unfavourable? Just run away

Not like Yamato can catch up.

[cyan oriole]

well, more like Yamato wouldn't bother trying to catch up

[eternal veldt]

Or maybe DesRon 23 decides they're fed up with the IJN and decides to launch some funnies at Yamato.

[cyan oriole]

Yamato could probably prolong that engagement long enough for something else to happen by just running it after the Iowa, but I doubt Kurita would make that order with enemy carrier forces in the area

[eternal veldt]

The thing is, both ships have surface radars and scout planes

If the engagement demands self preservation, both would withdraw once terms are found to be unfavourable

This was not the case for Ten-Go and Kikusui, where the terms of engagement is "Get to Okinawa or die trying because Hirohito questioned the value of the navy"

[eternal veldt]

I remember posting a story about a gold ring being used in the construction of Tennessee/California but being mixed up here before

Right, there it is. The one with the rivet wins. /s

[maiden citrus]

lol cute

[grave ravine]

No one remembers DesRon 54, they actually sank a Japanese battleship

[eternal veldt]

Fusou with Melvin, I presume?

[grave ravine]

yep

[eternal veldt]

A rare case of friendly fire too, I believe, from Denver, not to Melvin.

[grave ravine]

I believe one of the other destroyers from the squadron also scored one or two hits on Yamashiro, but they werent fatal

[eternal veldt]

Albert W Grant.

[grave ravine]

Grant was in a different squadron

they (Grant's squadron) might have finished off Yamashiro though, circumstances are unclear

[eternal veldt]

Eh, Yamashiro is getting shat on by WV at that point

Still amazes me how the very first salvo is a hit

[grave ravine]

yeah definitely, its just possible that a couple torps from 56 may have connected too during that period

[eternal veldt]

Come to think of it, Im not sure when the US Desrons finally learnt to communicate with the larger ships - as of Empress Augusta Bay, the DesRons are still somewhat bewildered by the actions of the Crudivs, IIRC.

Tassafaronga is a case of squadrons never operating before.

[grave ravine]

The plan at Surigao was that the DesRons were supposed to attack and then be out of there before the cruisers and battleships even opened fire

Desron 56 was just the last one to attack, and then they got off to a late start, so Grant got caught in the crossfire

[subtle prawn]

https://bsky.app/profile/navalinstitute.bsky.social/post/3llhihcjuf224
https://bsky.app/profile/navalinstitute.bsky.social/post/3llhihgqvoc24

U.S. Naval Institute (@navalinstitute.bsky.social)

#OTD in 1942, the destroyer HMS Campbeltown (the former USS Buchanan) rammed the gates of the Normandie dry dock at St.Nazaire in German-occupied France. Commandos then disembarked to destroy machinery and other targets.

Bluesky · Mar 28, 2025, 6:54 PM

U.S. Naval Institute (@navalinstitute.bsky.social)

-# ↩ U.S. Naval Institute (@navalinstitute.bsky.social)
The delayed-action explosives hidden on Campbeltown detonated hours later, knocking the dock out of service for the remainder of the war and killing several senior German officers who were touring the ship.

Bluesky · Mar 28, 2025, 6:54 PM

[narrow rover]

Sometimes I swear armies just decide to full send it

This one, operation cerberus, etc

Either glorious moments or hilarious failures

[burnt scarab]

https://youtu.be/4dXng59Yja8?si=r2JM4NAu2c1-oZUF

https://youtu.be/gXXk83jimu0?si=SNTEvl5UsOgvvzNs

https://youtu.be/CEICbAUmqRA?si=nTzS-7pwgiIhfFaq

https://youtu.be/3Gkhff2tWvs?si=wWiZF_KK6OLsc9r5

[cyan oriole]

powerful german engineering vs STRONG Russian marshland who wins

[mint quiver]

You know that it goes both ways

Unless you got them T-34 hovercraft blueprints from some sekrit documents stashed in the deepest parts of Stalin's asshole

[cyan oriole]

aka: average world of tanks creation

https://tenor.com/view/clash-royale-heheheha-gif-1227201251014243577

[mint quiver]

I take my Tiger 2 wunderwaffe over anything that game does

TFW tank doesn't even appear on Wikipedia

[cyan oriole]

meanwhile Gaijin source for their vehicles is literally wikipedia KEKW

average dogshit game vs dogshit game competition

[mint quiver]

Man you don't understand the pain when you are looking for a source on a Tank from wot but the only source is the wot

[cyan oriole]

eh, you just have to go deeper
although there is always a random 25% chance with some of the creations™️ that it's completely fake with no indication

[mint quiver]

I don't even want to go deeper

[cyan oriole]

like for the longest time, nobody know what Paolo Emilio (wows) was based off of, but it turns out that details are published in a Russian book

and also on that note I never got the "realism" argument for WT naval, it's also arcade bullshit

[mint quiver]

It has aviation Battleships

[cyan oriole]

at least take the arcade bullshit that's polished and has developers

meanwhile WT has crew as healtbars

[mint quiver]

Well I'm not complaining

[cyan oriole]

although don't even get me started on wows magic buttons and captain spells

[mint quiver]

If they wanted a full realism then BB battle could take hours

I mean it already takes at least 7-8 mins

And it's still way faster than it was

[cyan oriole]

yeah, and even then people still whine about "muh realism!!"

bro wants to have a 2.5% hit rate in a battle that takes 36 hours

[mint quiver]

Once I got a guy firing at me for straight 10 mins

He didn't kill me

I was barely floating

But I survived the whole battle getting shot by 5-6 ships

[cyan oriole]

now that's what we call a Scharnhorst moment

[mint quiver]

Yes it really is

[cyan oriole]

Hans in the engine spaces singlehandedly preventing the ship from being sunk:

[mint quiver]

Also that Germans predicted that their ship's are going to be in WT

So they made them specifically for it

[cyan oriole]

WT players when ships are designed for realistic naval combat and not for never repair AA mounts gaming (time to leak classified documents)
vs
wows players when their battleship doesn't have 300mm armor on the tip of the nose (unplayable)

[mint quiver]

I always was surprised how out of place the WoWs naval combat felt

Arguably DDs are fun

But BBs feel like wet pancake

[cyan oriole]

issue with wows is it's so hard to get good at the game

and low tiers are totally different from high tiers

honestly I would never recommend wows to people looking for a game

only because of sunk cost fallacy do I still play

[mint quiver]

Both games have their issues

But honestly I prefer WT over WoWs

WoWs always feels wrong to me

[cyan oriole]

that's pretty much the general consensus, Sea Lord Mountbatten made a comparison video twice, and each time he basically said "both have their merits, it's personal preference"

is WT naval still mostly bots?

or did humans start coming back

[mint quiver]

Depends on Naval EC it's all players

High tier is bots

Mid and low players

[cyan oriole]

always been the opposite here, low tiers are all bots (except in pve), high tiers are all the players

which is good, low tier is an unbalanced shithole where BB is half the work for 2x the results

[mint quiver]

But now they are going to add the big BBs this year

So Iowa Bismarck etc

[cyan oriole]

don't doubt that will be an unbalanced mess

Bismarck will be unkillable

[mint quiver]

So it will probably have a resurgence

[mint quiver]

They are adding blueprint ships too

But if it's anything like Scharnhorst

Then probably yeah

[cyan oriole]

yeah next is H-39 I bet

and speaking of blueprints, I hear Gaijin hates them

did they fix Scharnhorst's modeling errors yet?

[mint quiver]

?

[cyan oriole]

and there were also a lot of threads on Asian social medias complaining about Amagi's modeling

[cyan oriole]

most notably, the armor profile was wrong for many years

to be fair, even Raeder fell for the misinformation

[mint quiver]

Scharnhorst is as strong as it was before so I'm not sure

[cyan oriole]

they fixed it! I'm so proud of them

[grave ravine]

I mean there are plenty of things in WT that are modeled correctly and just totally busted anyways

[cyan oriole]

yeah Scharn wasn't ever usted because of the incorrect modeling, it was because of bad game design

turns out having to detonate the magazines or massacre the entire crew to stop the ship is kinda difficult against the German armor scheme at close range

[grave ravine]

I can't really comment much because the sum total of my WT naval experience is taking out the SKR-7 for battle pass missions

[cyan oriole]

crazy how the damage model differences between wows and WT make german BBs go from godlike to turbodogshit

[mint quiver]

Told ya German's predicted WT

[cyan oriole]

the Germans laugh at all the historians who called their armor scheme "basically from WW1"

who is laughing now as Hood and Alaska are powerless against godlike superior German engineering

[mint quiver]

Mostly because you usually fight at 8km

[grave ravine]

game devs are constrained by the fact that real naval combat isn't fun

[cyan oriole]

no, in wows you have normal healthbars, so you just eat fullpens through the side and die (or 10k from any angle into the base of the giant superstructure)

[mint quiver]

Plus if you don't want to come to Scharnhorst it will come to you

[cyan oriole]

that's pretty much how Bismarck was taken down irl, WG did a good job with that

wows used to be so much of a better game back in the olden days, rip

[grave ravine]

WoWS just makes shit up whole cloth, its an arcade vehicular combat game with WW2 ship skins

[cyan oriole]

pretty much

but the game is at its core very well designed

obviously the balance between classes needs tweaks (currently how it works is BB beats everything on the surface, CV beats everything in general, and submarine plays its own minigame), but otherwise it's very well done

[mint quiver]

I wonder how Sovyetsky Soyuz vs Bismarck will be

[grave ravine]

WT is a mess of bad design decisions in the quest to at least mostly realistically model vehicles, and then make a fair and fun game out of them

[cyan oriole]

let's be real: wows models MUCH more realistically than WT does

[mint quiver]

But ngl gonna laugh if Scharnhorst still gonna be top dog after they release big ships

[cyan oriole]

WT naval's issue is that War Thunder is a game about planes and tanks

not ships

and the damage model is dogshit for ship combat

[mint quiver]

Na it's mostly bad game design

[cyan oriole]

^

the main error of WT is using an ahistorical damage model based on tank combat (aka full crew wipeout or ammo rack), for ships

cuz ships are an afterthought for the devs

[grave ravine]

I mean the game mechanics of WT are a mess, but generally speaking anything where the characteristics are clearly specified is usually (though certainly not always) right, whereas WG feels free to completely change the characteristics of ships and tanks and shit from their real characteristics for game balance purposes and what not

[mint quiver]

I mean it's a problem with a whole gamemode rather than damage model itself

[grave ravine]

yeah basically

[cyan oriole]

true, but WG's modelling doesn't make as many blatant historical errors

at leasty until recently when they went full fanfic mode

and started making up shit

[grave ravine]

They have been making shit up from the beginning

[cyan oriole]

only historical error on launch was Zao

which is from a magazine article that based it off of an American cruiser for some reason

[mint quiver]

But again when I start playing WoWs i start hearing goofy ass circus music

[cyan oriole]

oh and Scharnhorst had incorrect armor scheme as in WT, but WG fixed it within a few months

while Gaijin took years

[mint quiver]

Ships feel like RC models

[cyan oriole]

not saying WG makes a historically accurate game, just saying that apart from their changes, they do a very good job with accuracy

their Gneisenau and Bayern fictional refits were also very well done, although from there everything went downhill with the fictional refits

and as for arcade, WT and WoWS are both very arcade, just WoWS doesn't lie and pretend to be realistic

[cyan oriole]

they're also massively upscaled, by their own measuring scale the ships are over a kilometer long

the distance compression of wows was one of WG's best design decisions

[mint quiver]

Honestly i wish there was a naval strat sim with direct control and mp

[maiden citrus]

rule the waves 3 multiplayer would be absurdly interesting

[cyan oriole]

I might make one of those someday

[grave ravine]

saying they do a good job with accuracy is meaningless, because as you put it WoWS doesn't even pretend to be realistic

they don't strive for accuracy

the devs just put in whatever they want

[cyan oriole]

???

[mint quiver]

Waiting for some

[grave ravine]

like flat out every gun in the game has like half the range it should have IRL or something like that to make the maps work

[mint quiver]

Cold Waters also I think are supposed to have mp

[cyan oriole]

I guess the better word is faithful

[cyan oriole]

cuz they are limited by fire control

[cyan oriole]

when WG models a historical ship, they are faithful to the original

they make their standardized changes (increasing plating to 32mm, refitting, changing numbers, etc) to fit the game, but the ship at its core looks accurate to what it should be

WoWS issue was never with art department or research teams

[mint quiver]

Ok what's the point of arguing over WoWs realism tho

[maiden citrus]

wows errors are pretty mild compared to things like shimikaze having incorrect guns and them trying to put their foot down about it lol

[cyan oriole]

oh right I suppressed that memory kekw

[mint quiver]

Gajin is a shit company

[cyan oriole]

the classic is Scharnhorst armor being wrong for years after research from 6 years ago, and them failing to change it forever

[mint quiver]

And they are probably gonna be

[cyan oriole]

at least you guys can organize a review bomb

our boomers could never

[mint quiver]

I mean even by Gajin standards monetisation of WG games is crazy

[cyan oriole]

funny, I always said that WT monetization and grind is even worse than WoWS

WG is more about nilking the whales with insane gambling events that are totally optional

they have some people who spent thousands on the game, to support the F2P army

not sure about WT grind, but at some point, buying premiums is pretty much necessary to cut the grind down from the timescale of years, no?

[mint quiver]

Idk i did not bother with proper grind for a long time

And shit is apparently better now

[eternal veldt]

The funny thing is that WT typically has the "the models are more accurate, care more about history" crowd

(the boats were, in fact, modelled worse than WG in some cases)

[mint quiver]

As for money naval prem 5.0 and you are set on SL front

[cyan oriole]

yeah that's why I always fight against that, IDK why Gaijin gets all the credit when even WG's laziest copypastes are better a lot of the time

Gaijin will always be for tanks and planes, cuz that's their market
their ships are always going to be made from handmedowns and dumpsterdiving

[cyan oriole]

good, but the same is in WoWS

[eternal veldt]

WG is a bit of a hit and miss as well recently

[cyan oriole]

you can grind from T1 to T10 in about 4 hours or so after the economy reworks

[eternal veldt]

Suzuya's accurate for the most part

Blücher isn't

[cyan oriole]

haven't seen Blucher model yet, how bad is it

[eternal veldt]

Fairly decent, addresses the big noticeable parts

[cyan oriole]

haven't really paid attention to the latest releases, last I remember is funny Jaarsveld having a turret on the machinery spaces

[eternal veldt]

But the curvature of the bulkheads near the conning tower isn't curved, a sign it is copied over from Hipper

Suboptimal, but far better than some WG hypotheticals

Cf: Italian high tiers

[cyan oriole]

we don't talk about cocklombo and Venezia

or even worse, whatever they were smoking with Libertad line

https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/719190140

this is what I was thinking of about Amagi

apparently Gaijin mashed blueprints together, and then made a few strange creations because they didn't know what some of the pieces did

oh and the turret is the Nagato's modernized turret instead of the original design, which is kinda hilarious

[eternal veldt]

Not the best, but passable.

Not like Amagi ever made it off the stocks.

[cyan oriole]

apparently wows Amagi is pretty good, but they have issues with Yumihari and Bungo

WG artistic intepretations are something to behold, certainly

[cyan oriole]

hopefully Gaijin doesn't mess up the historical behemoths like Bismarck, Iowa, Yamato etc

that would get a lot of people mad

[eternal veldt]

No, WoWS Amagi also has issues

The copypasted Nagato bridge, 8 Type 89s without the removal of any casemates, and the same Nagato turrets are similar problems

[cyan oriole]

maybe someday WG updates the prehistoric models instead of adding more gambling events

[eternal veldt]

They won't, because
A) it doesn't add new content, meaning the dev cycle does not address content droughts

B) Does not generate a venue for revenue

The US destroyers are only done because theyre one of the oldest and Gearing is just flat out horribly wrong

[cyan oriole]

eh, in the newest devblog they update US cruisers and Soviet DDs, so maybe things are looking up

I doubt they will ever fix their game (from now until shutdown the game will remain flawed and unbalanced), but a few model improvements might still be in the cards

[supple sandal]

Any idea what ship is this, chat?

[cyan oriole]

it's an American treaty cruiser

I'd say it's a Northampton, because of the weird tripod thing

of course it could also be a rendition of a New Orleans or something

[wintry moat]

That looks like a Kirov to me

[eternal veldt]

Its a Kirov...

The quadrupedal structure, closely grouped together guns and a flush forecastle are telltale signatures

[cyan oriole]

kekw

right

[maiden citrus]

secondary guns are a good indicator too

[spring briar]

Thats Kirov

Fuck
Silver already got it

[burnt scarab]

Iowa or New Jersy maybe

[rapid cairn]

Old footage of McArthur in my hometown

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaetano_Faillace

[runic ermine]

Kinda funny how some South Koreans worshipped him as a religious deity at one point

[terse mesa]

https://youtu.be/GuwPILhNGOM?si=PhRza57glpS7tReQ

[narrow rover]

"How does one become a samurai"
"IDK kill yourselves"
"Hai"

[mint quiver]

Peak Japanese mentality

[mental tapir]

https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2025/04/new-u-s-navy-aircraft-carrier-to-be-named-uss-musk/

[rapid cairn]

Wha

[rapid cairn]

Bruh

[remote monolith]

Yamamoto Tsunenotomo is literally the entire reason for the Uber death cult Imperial Japan became

basically changed the perspective of samurais into the honorabru type when samurais like Nobuhide Tsuchimochi were pragmatics who retreat when necessary and avoids senseless losses

[narrow rover]

Imperial Japan is probably a good study on peer pressure because a lot of soldiers later admitted they didn't want to fight to the death but they had no other choice because such a mentality was so prevalent within the ranks

[wooden sentinel]

1937 yamashiro

[subtle prawn]

April Fools

[subtle prawn]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TikuQLpu6c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxFY5OdirK8

[mint quiver]

tfw you are gaslighted into killing yourself

[burnt scarab]

Maybe they hail General MacArthur as a hero or something Countryballs. Either way, it works

[runic ermine]

I'm being serious
https://www.yahoo.com/news/korean-shamans-worshipped-general-douglas-173117247.html#:~:text=It lived on through the,shamanism has made a comeback.

[burnt scarab]

Maybe they view him as a hero

[fierce sparrow]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcr2WCSEWDU

[mental tapir]

Imagine worshipping MacArthur instead of Matthew Ridgeway

[frozen kestrel]

wait hang on, big e the third's supposed to be launched this year?

[desert agate]

https://x.com/rdphistory/status/1907166971222724817?s=46

Ricky D Phillips - Military Historian (@RDPHistory) on X

April 1st 1982: The first Argentines come ashore in the dark: 91 Buzo Tactico & Comandos Anfibios in 21 rubber boats, to the South of Stanley. They land silently, bypassing a four man team in the dark who aren't Royal Marines, but are seen to be well armed through night scopes...

X · Apr 1, 2025, 8:23 PM

[terse mesa]

https://youtu.be/zzKWMb6gNr0?si=n0fcNhm9JUFhv8vQ

[narrow rover]

Mac is pretty ass as a commander but goddang his PR team was something else

[runic ermine]

I think the Chinese would have probably asked the same thing

[burnt scarab]

https://tenor.com/view/problematic-stressed-smh-oh-dear-oh-boy-gif-16135695

[narrow rover]

I honestly dunno how Big Mac succeeded in the military because he feels more suited for a civilian political figure

I mean politics is what he did best and he wasn't all that good as a commander...

[fierce sparrow]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdGHf1GNVCY

[desert agate]

He was promoted beyond his competence

As a lower ranked commander he was well suited to taking initiative and coordinating his personnel

His egotism was genuinely quite beneficial

But of course as a senior officer, he was much more a hindrance than an asset

[autumn sorrel]

Didn't the Chinese know all of US offensive plan by simply watch MacArthur press conference and his movement between Japan and Korea?

[subtle prawn]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GPxjvlF5X4

[subtle prawn]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM-9GOOslR8

[exotic pulsar]

433 herself

Porthole from the CV-6 USS Enterprise
Only known porthole to exist on public display at the National Museum of Naval Aviation at Pensacola Naval Air Station

[subtle prawn]

https://bsky.app/profile/navalinstitute.bsky.social/post/3lm6dccihbs2w

U.S. Naval Institute (@navalinstitute.bsky.social)

#OTD in 1968, the battleship USS New Jersey (BB-62) was recommissioned after spending ten and half years in the "mothball fleet" in Bayonne. Six month later, the New Jersey began to conduct shore bombardment in Vietnam.

▶ Play video

Bluesky · Apr 6, 2025, 8:53 PM

https://news.usni.org/2025/04/06/navy-commissions-virginia-class-attack-boat-uss-iowa

[narrow rover]

Welcome back Iowa

[timber linden]

Happy anniversary

[warm ferry]

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_aircraft_carrier_Taihō launch day

[inland saddle]

A question for you guys:

Do you think sunking the captured French ships after the 1940 defeat was a justified decision ?

As a Frenchman myself, it breaks my heart but I’d like to hear your opinions .

[zenith flame]

I would rather more ship than less

Smort peepo of the ALO history channel, my quest to discover this Corsair variant has brought me here

[mint quiver]

Welp they would probably serve KMS then

Not 100% sure but better safe than sorry

[cyan oriole]

justified? yes

correct? probably not

but the precautions had to be taken, and without hindsight it was probably the right thing to do

[lime scarab]

Question how many wired ideas did Hitler had that were planned or either just thoughts he had about ending the war or after he won?

I know he wanted a fighter plan that could fly all the way to New York to bomb it

[remote monolith]

If you're talking about Wunderwaffe projects many were simply desperation projects thought out well after everything went to shit and they wanted to turn the tide somehow

[lime scarab]

How many plans did they have in order to hopefully “turn the tired” on the war?

[remote monolith]

The V-2, the Amerikabomber, the Volksjager, the Jagernot program, the V-3, and the entirety of rhe Entwicklung program for starters

These are just the ones that actually entered prototype stages in varius different forms

Hell the V-2 got mass produced but never got a good result

[lime scarab]

I also remember herring they were trying to build a nuke before America could

[remote monolith]

Only up to a certain point, and they never got close to an actual weaponised nuclear weapon due to a massive lack of funds, knowledge and materials necessary

[lime scarab]

So basically your saying these ideas of wonder-weapons where basically failed attempts to stop the war form tipping to the allies favor

[remote monolith]

Yes, because Germany was visibly overwhelmed in conventional warfare they turned to alternative means to level the playing field

[lime scarab]

Like missles that can guide themselves to there target destation.

[remote monolith]

The V-program, yes, V-1 was able to get somewhat intercepted, V-2 was not but suffered from poor quality controls, faulty intels on actual targets worthy to get shot at so it tends to hilariously miss, and it killed more people in its production than it ever did exploding after launch

[lime scarab]

It sound like Hitler and his high command were really banking on these weapons to work

[remote monolith]

It got worse as the war went on and they're getting hammered everywhere

[lime scarab]

It also interests me of historian trying to find out which event cost the Germans the war. Many point to the invasion of Russia

What are you thoughts?

[mint quiver]

Glory to the Divine Heroes of the Imperial Navy!

We humbly honor the sacred valor of the Imperial Japanese Navy, whose righteous strike against imperialist aggression in 1941. The visionary High Command, guided by unyielding devotion to the Yamato spirit, forged destiny with unwavering resolve. Let tears fall for the noble Yamato, martyred in Operation Ten-Go—a testament to eternal sacrifice for the Emperor’s radiant realm!

We prostrate ourselves before the Eternal Throne, vowing ten thousand kowtows to atone for past ignorance. May the souls of these radiant warriors shine forever in Takama-ga-hara!

I apologize for my past statements about IJN

i clearly was wrong

[cyan oriole]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/749483175012466721/1249104922306154527/Untitled.gif

[subtle prawn]

https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2025/04/australia-o-romeo-romeo-wherefore-art-thou-romeo/

[narrow rover]

If you look at Axis projects vs. allied ones, the axis nuke projects were almost always too fragmented

The Japanese one especially is a shitshow with both navy and army running separate programs
Meanwhile the US had Stimson and Roosevelt leading the project, a charismatic leader in Groves, and they pooled the already massive economy into one project for maximum efficiency

Even then building the nuke was something of a challenge..

[remote monolith]

yeah the Axis just suffered from chronic resources issues and management disasters

turns out applying social darwinism to government institutions leads to massive inefficiency

[runic ermine]

The minor powers were just begging the big 3 for equipment

And the big 3 just gave them second rate stuff most of the time

[desert agate]

A rather unfortunate problem for us to have, but it does give us quite a large reserve for deployment on the LHDs

When we decided to expand the Romeo fleet though, we had 2 more ships in the surface fleet, and we won’t see surface fleet expanded to compensate for that loss until end of decade

[autumn sorrel]

I would say, War with UK. When Germany are cut off from international trade due to Blockade, they are also cut off from the strategic resource they need to make harden steel, food and rubber. German industry can produce substitute but with British Strategic bombing campaign, it meant that Germany industry output also suffer.

[grave ravine]

If you are talking about Mers el Kebir, its worth noting that the ships in question were still in Vichy French hands

[grave ravine]

not really, its worth noting that the when the Germans did attempt to seize the French fleet at Toulon in 1942, they scuttled themselves

The Vichy French govt were certainly no friends of the British, and the Vichy navy at times took part in direct hostilities with the British, and was generally a force that needed to be considered and worked around, but they certainly weren't working hand in glove with the Nazis, and at least some element of the hostility between the Vichy govt and Britain can be attributed to Mers el Kebir

[remote monolith]

Militarily at least a lot of Vichy personnel weren't particularly enthused at fighting the Allies.

Politically though

Well let's just say a lot of Jews went missing from France

[grave ravine]

Its ultimately not clear whether the attack on Mers el Kebir was the correct decision or not, and there were likely off ramps that could have been taken, but ultimately it happened, and who knows what would have happened otherwise

[grave ravine]

Ultimately they were still a nasty collaborationist regime

just one with enough power to look after their own self interest to an extent rather than just be puppets for the Nazis

[remote monolith]

Overall not much different than Germany's eastern allies who quickly scrambled for exit plans when things went south but still contributed a lot to Holocaust deaths all the while

[spring briar]

I hate Vichy

[inland saddle]

Me too

We wouldn't have lost the Dunkerque so quickly if Vichy haven't choose to surrender, we could have keep fighting

[spring briar]

It has nothing to do with what they did with the ships

If anything that was a positive thing

[inland saddle]

They did worse, I know

[inland saddle]

How could it be positive ?

[spring briar]

Keeping them out of the German’s hands

[inland saddle]

But loosing our own pride

[compact glen]

Fair enough I suppose

[spring briar]

Who tf cares about pride when lives are at stake
Vichy already lost all its credibility to begin with

[inland saddle]

True

[spring briar]

Would’ve been nice if the government made different decisions from the get go

Like sending the majority of the fleet to the US at the start

But thats wishful thinking

[narrow rover]

There is a reason the French occupation zone in Germany did hardly any denazification. There were already a shit tonne of collaborators in France itself...
Not like denazification was especially successful anyway

[spring briar]

Now you’re just pushing a dumb point

[remote monolith]

hey at least Laval got executed as he deserved

and the French were sufficiently anti-Nazi that they ratted out Joachim Peiper and assassinated him

[narrow rover]

Peiper was utterly stupid for living in postwar France lol
🤣

[compact glen]

Joachim Peiper?

The commander of the blowtorch battalion?

[eternal veldt]

Don't worry, I got a new one to run around with

[narrow rover]

Yea the guy did translation work in France in the 1970s

Until some people assassinated him

[compact glen]

Ah

Read up on him rq

1976 I believe

[eternal veldt]

If anything, scuttling is the final act of defiance, and an act that the Marine Nationale should be proud of for not allowing the ships be pressed into foreign service.

More importantly, this tragedy could and should have been avoided if an opportunistic twat called Darlan isn't at the helm of the MN

[compact glen]

Hah I'm too tired to have noticed the screenshot said 1976

[autumn sorrel]

I still don't know why Darlan don't just fuck off to the Sea and Ignore the Vichy government, he literally have the command and loyalty of MN. Instead he stay back and play petty politics.

Is he afraid that because many of his sailors have families in Metropolitan French that their loyalty and Zeal cannot be guarantee or he simply want the British to give him even more for his service?

[zenith flame]

ZR-3 on CV-3

[remote monolith]

https://youtu.be/mbhQ8sO2vQs?si=kzAqAcfsBUQ8NA_r

[timber linden]

April 9th 1945

The only decent surface ship of the german navy meets her fate

[runic ermine]

Also:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimy_Ridge_Day

[subtle prawn]

https://bsky.app/profile/navalinstitute.bsky.social/post/3lmfjpnnc3s22

U.S. Naval Institute (@navalinstitute.bsky.social)

#OTD in 1941, USS North Carolina (BB-55) became the first new American battleship to be commissioned in 18 years. The North Carolina could fire twelve tons of steel in one salvo, which was six times the payload of a long-range bomber at the time.

Bluesky · Apr 9, 2025, 5:37 PM

[warm ferry]

the titanic set sail 113 years ago today

[timber linden]

https://youtu.be/TPIcz5lYiNI?si=lwgrQ_5dHNyz01Mf

[timber linden]

https://youtu.be/tLVKHXvJKe0?si=kXxO5A_vJcaqjllm

[timber linden]

https://youtu.be/bfQ0xhc9sDg?si=-fWpbaSSebSWRdJM

[subtle prawn]

https://bsky.app/profile/navalinstitute.bsky.social/post/3lmkcwq366s2q

U.S. Naval Institute (@navalinstitute.bsky.social)

#OTD in 1945, a kamikaze struck USS Missouri (BB-63) during the Battle of Okinawa, leaving his plane's machine gun impaled in the flash suppressor of a Bofors 40mm. The attack caused minor damage but the Missouri shrugged it off and did not even alter her course.

Bluesky · Apr 11, 2025, 3:19 PM

[subtle prawn]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoF-OT_2aS8

[subtle prawn]

https://www.dsca.mil/Congressional-Notification-Archive/Article/4150603/australia-aim-120c-and-aim-120d-advanced-medium-range-air-to-air-missiles

[mental tapir]

The B-47 is such an interesting aircraft; a bomber with a fighter-like bubble canopy

Wait the B-36 also had them

[eternal veldt]

Canberra as well.

[maiden stirrup]

As did the Valiant and the Vulcan, to a degree.

[mental tapir]

I suppose it's more my being used to seeing airliner-shaped aircraft have razorback canopies

[lethal wing]

The B-17 probably had the closest thing the the 747's flight deck, which makes sense as they were both produced by Boeing and are 4-engined aircraft.

[muted dove]

Have there ever been any instances where a non warfare aircraft carrier was made/used?
Only one I can think of that was kinda similar was the spacex autonomous spaceport drone ship (ASDS) but I was looking for something not so abstract and kinda similar to ship that launches planes just not for defence/war purposes

[eternal veldt]

closest I can think of is the RFA Argus, which did carry combat aircraft during the Falklands War but nowadays a aviation training/hospital ship.

[subtle prawn]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeir5-cXsEg

[lethal wing]

USS New Jersey, the second Iowa-class battleship, was launched on the first anniversary of the Attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7th, 1942, but was not commissioned until late May of 1943 (May 23rd). In total, she was commissioned and decommissioned 4 times over her entire career. She is the most decorated battleship in the US Navy, and still survives to this day as a Museum Ship in Camden, New Jersey, and is open to the public.

[runic ermine]

Why did the Germans have so many forgien units in ww2?

[remote monolith]

they ramped up recruitments once they figured out they're losing and the German manpower pool was insufficient too keep up with wartime demands

so everyone up to the SS started changing their propagandas to accomodate anyone that wants to sign in

[runic ermine]

But they had quite a few in 1941

[remote monolith]

which for the most part were tiny before 1943

the SS for the most part didn

't turn away eager volunteers

if you see their organizational charts they often barely exceeded battalion strength

[runic ermine]

The British Free Corps with like 54 dudes:

Some of which aren't even British

[grave ravine]

I mean for the most part various Free Allied forces and such just served under their own flags

But they would usually still be subordinate to whatever allied command was in the area

[spring briar]

Not hard when most of their territorial gains were in 1940

Opening up a pool of Frenchmen, Norwegians, Danish, Belgians, Dutch

[runic ermine]

The British Free Corps fought for Germany

[timber linden]

Have a night to remember everyone

[timber linden]

https://www.youtube.com/live/SMyv4yPwiOI?si=zuq4WQqsj1F9AIUa

[desert agate]

Perhaps they should have considered avoiding the iceberg

[worn parcel]

SHE HIT THE BERG

[mint quiver]

Captain - "nah I'd win"

[subtle prawn]

https://bsky.app/profile/navalinstitute.bsky.social/post/3lmsretsg3c2q

U.S. Naval Institute (@navalinstitute.bsky.social)

#OTD 1943, U.S. Naval Intelligence decrypted a message that revealed the travel schedule for ADM Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet. Four days later, P-38s flew 600 miles and shot down the plane carrying the man who had planned the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Bluesky · Apr 14, 2025, 11:58 PM

https://bsky.app/profile/navalinstitute.bsky.social/post/3lmrxaxsiuc2q

U.S. Naval Institute (@navalinstitute.bsky.social)

#OTD in 1962, John F. Kennedy hosted foreign dignitaries aboard USS Enterprise to watch the Navy demonstrate the latest surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles against a drone. After the missiles failed to score a single hit, a dignitary asked if his country could buy the drone.

Bluesky · Apr 14, 2025, 4:11 PM

[warm ferry]

Fly over

[worn parcel]

She's gone, rest in peace

[exotic pulsar]

On this day - 113 years ago
41.46N 50.14W
RMS Titanic, White Star Line's newest steamship, was lost after striking a iceberg
But of the 2,208 that boarded, only 712 survived.
1,496 were lost

[next skiff]

Visited Tirpitz’s grave

[subtle prawn]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNWlpJaclrA

[subtle prawn]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87n53u167UU

[runic ermine]

In short:
https://youtu.be/YKm_BKOVz5I?si=8uPtonrCCwpFJV9f

[subtle prawn]

https://bsky.app/profile/navalinstitute.bsky.social/post/3lmu5uyjnr22q

U.S. Naval Institute (@navalinstitute.bsky.social)

#OTD in 1943, USS Yorktown (CV-10) was commissioned. She would go on to serve with distinction in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. This clip of the Yorktown firing her 5 inch guns is from the 1944 documentary THE FIGHTING LADY.

▶ Play video

Bluesky · Apr 15, 2025, 1:15 PM

[timber linden]

Isnt there a lot of her just laying around?

[timber linden]

https://youtu.be/M8tKyXiVs4w?si=-q28H68oLniL6vuo

[rapid junco]

A IAM Ro.43 being hoisted by the cruiser Luigi Cardona. 1938

[next skiff]

Around 10% across 1 sqkm

[burnt scarab]

I heard about the sinking of Titanic Kaga. Even in the movies and in documentary like Seconds from Disaster

[burnt scarab]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-kkrHswfPVs&pp=ygUmc2lua2luZyBvZiBwcmluY2Ugb2Ygd2FsZXMgYW5kIHJlcHVsc2U%3D

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yGzi1NtXnv4&pp=ygUTc2lua2luZyBvZiBiaXNtYXJjaw%3D%3D

[worn parcel]

Today, 113 years ago, RMS Titanic was supposed to arrive in New York.

[lethal wing]

May the 1.5k+ people who died in the sinking rest in peace.

[tribal mortar]

Blub blub

[narrow rover]

[fierce sparrow]

https://fxtwitter.com/ChungTzuW/status/1912836706916499845

Chung-Tzu (@ChungTzuW)

In Clash of Armor (1987), you can see here the two DIVAD (Division Air Defense) prototypes, the XM246 and M247 Sergeant York.

**💬 9 🔁 91 ❤️ 669 👁️ 21.7K **

▶ Play video

FxTwitter · Apr 17, 2025, 11:53 AM

[grave ravine]

the video also had a neat shot of one of the prototype quad missile roland launchers

[zinc ginkgo]

Doing a althist fiction. Does anyone know what we're the closest things ti Shocktroopers that France had in WW1?

[spring briar]

Who wins ww1 in your scenario

[remote monolith]

Kinda difficult to answer since Allied countries generally didn't use them

Arditi would be the closest equivalent

So you can go off that I guess

Or if you want you can simply make up your own shock troops trained in infiltration tactics

Typically they're trained to move quickly in small groups and proficient in closse quarter combats, carrying equipments like knives and grenades tailored for that

[spring briar]

All late war entente troops were kinda shock troops in a way

But the closest thing to French shock troops would be smth like the foreign legion

Idk

[remote monolith]

Yeah good point, modern commandos basically are shock troops in principle

[subtle prawn]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8q692B0asI

[narrow rover]

WW1 also sort of had only one conclusion tbh

Only delayed that much because the US was hesitant

[muted dove]

Why were Aircraft cruisers rendered useless due to "development of naval aircraft"? Is it referring to the jet engine?

Although the first jet engine plane test was '41, not 30's...

[mint quiver]

Playn got faster bigger and heavier

Also monoplanes generate less lift

Thus higher stall speed

[muted dove]

oh i see

[zinc ginkgo]

nobody really. it'ssort of a AL fanfic with my take on the lore, so WW1 is just the 1st phase of the war against the sirens, including a land war.

[mint quiver]

Also aircraft carriers are just superior in their role

plus floatplanes are uhhh not the best

[mental tapir]

Imagine what could have been with the Convair F2Y though 😔

[mint quiver]

It goes right there with me163

[runic ermine]

Senegalese tirailleurs

[spring briar]

Nah

[runic ermine]

Ok then what?

The 152nd Regiment?

[subtle prawn]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5VCvyVgE5I

[subtle prawn]

https://bsky.app/profile/navalinstitute.bsky.social/post/3ln4aobo3rk2b

U.S. Naval Institute (@navalinstitute.bsky.social)

#OTD in 1942, sixteen B-25B Mitchell bombers led by Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle launched from USS Hornet to attack Tokyo. The daring raid boosted US morale while causing panic in Japan. The mission was also a significant achievement in joint Army-Navy operations.

▶ Play video

Bluesky · Apr 18, 2025, 6:26 PM

[zinc ginkgo]

well, i'll probably use them and the foreign legion as the backbones for the french ones.

[subtle prawn]

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-hudsons-bay-to-auction-off-artifacts-including-1670-charter/

[mental tapir]

https://youtu.be/tdWqSCcS-wQ?si=9sgZAfXn_qrD_RAw

[cyan oriole]

@alpine onyx a question if it's not too much trouble: what specifically was above Bismarck's main deck that was below the main deck in other BBs?

I often hear this listed as a major weakness of the Bismarck (that there were important things topsides that were vulnerable to shelling and bombing), but I am looking for a bit for quantification

[alpine onyx]

I don't have the plan open rn, but what is commonly cited to be above the main deck is cabling, fire control cablings to be precise.

Which is true, there was cabling for fire control above the main deck, since wireless connections in the German Navy weren't a thing yet and you had to move data somehow between rangefingers and the plotting rooms. I haven't yet confirmed that, but I am quite sure that the other battleships of the era also ran some cables to their rangefinders.

Facility wise you will see a few rooms under armor that on German battleships will be on the intermediate deck, I'll guesstimate that the usual workshops might fall under that. What will fall under that is the ammo transfer system, at least USN battleships had a roller system between the ends so you could move shells between magazines, above the splinter deck but below the main deck. On German battleships that was above the main deck.

[narrow rover]

Roosevelt shortly before his death was probably going a bit mad if any of these descriptions are correct

[burnt scarab]

They were until that Lusutania sank causing the US to enter into WW1

[narrow rover]

Not even that really

[remote monolith]

The Germans were already bleeding out their manpower by 1918 and there's allied breakthroughs everywhere

The war would likely get prolonged, but stuff like Vittorio Veneto and Hundred Days Offensive would have broken the back of Germany

[mint quiver]

Not only that

but they also had severe resource shortages by then

[grave ravine]

Lusitania sank two years before the US entered the war

[burnt scarab]

Oh wait, you're right Dromeosaurus

Of course Al-Insaan, the Germans fought on two fronts. Be it against the Russian empire, the British and French as well.

[grave ravine]

The Germans won on the Russian front in 1917, and had shifted their forces to face West

The Entente rolled them in the hundred days offensive regardless

[burnt scarab]

Cause the Russian army were quelling this Communist Force Dromeosaurus

[grave ravine]

In 1918 both the Germans and the Entente had finally solved the tactical problem of Western Front trench warfare, but it was the Entente that had the operational and strategic wherewithal to carry things through to the end

[grave ravine]

It was with the Communists that Breast Litovsk was negotiated

[burnt scarab]

That's true. Well, at least The Entente learn the mistakes from the start of the First World War

[narrow rover]

Yea, probably, but it would have sure helped if the US got involved earlier...
The Russian revolution was arguably the most influential (and let's be real, destructive) events of the 20th century, preventing that or at least changing how it plays out would be huge

[vital hornet]

hey what are your guys thought on WW2 naval warfare, better or worse than modern tech

In my opinion ww2 is better

[mint quiver]

Modern Naval Warfare is much more complicated that WW2

[vital hornet]

agreed

[mint quiver]

It has transformed from Biggur gun

Biggur armor

Biggur Carrier

Towards Stealth CIWS and EW

[narrow rover]

On the other hand
Big cannon goes boom was way cooler

[inland orchid]

Don't forget the intercontinental hyper-sonic missile of doom

[burnt scarab]

The WWII navy battle I like is the Bismarck, Battle of Leyte Gulf and Operation Tengo mission Herts.

[mental tapir]

Reportedly the day after meeting the US VP too

[muted dove]

are there any current/past projects that involved making a plane that can launch smaller planes? kinda like a aircraft carrier aircraft
closest I think of is space shuttle but that was more of a rocket launching plane-esque rocket(?) than plane launching planes

[grave ravine]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_aircraft

[muted dove]

thanks! exactly what I wanted

[grave ravine]

Zveno project for example

Experimental aircraft like X-15 were also carried to altitude by other aircraft

[eternal veldt]

There is the original of them all

Akron and Macon

[grave ravine]

There were tests that predated Akron and Macon, though Akron and Macon were very much the most complete version of airships carrying aircraft

[lime scarab]

Hay new in-depth photos of Yorktown wreak which are really cool!!!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Shipwrecks/s/fjmmS8s3Ia

There also a whole map still in the wreak!!!

Also Yorktowns bell

More photos in the link

Second photos of Yorktown wreak

https://www.reddit.com/r/Shipwrecks/s/xtvBe3Fi6V

[lavish fable]

@slow radish Yorktown stuff

[slow radish]

[lime scarab]

They just released a part 3 want to see

[slow radish]

Bet

[lime scarab]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Shipwrecks/s/vRuE584wsK

[subtle prawn]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCVIQVBRgqU

[runic ermine]

Better than the SA80?

Isn't a high bar but still worth asking

[vital hornet]

Bro just got back from a trip out to the hood that shit awesome

https://tenor.com/view/navy-gif-23823168

[wintry moat]

You went out to the Wreck?

[vital hornet]

Ye

[subtle prawn]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrcN73pBQ3U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ9Ip1TyWJ4

[remote monolith]

(no it ain't)

[cyan oriole]

copium overdose

[twilit geyser]

Cody should honestly just stick with things that aren't naval related.

He's much better off with that.

[mental tapir]

If Cody was more based he would have done a video on an althist about Britain and France declaring war on Germany when they were invading Czechoslovakia instead of appeasement

Or an althist of Huntziger biting the dust early and the 1940 Ardennes YOLO completely failing

[fallen ocean]

Did Prinz Eugen ever actually exist or was she a paper ship? Just curious cause I don’t know much about the German navy…

[subtle prawn]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_cruiser_Prinz_Eugen

[desert agate]

With ANZAC Day coming to an end for Australia and New Zealand, I'd like to share an art installation I saw at the Australian National Memorial near Villers Bretonneux, France

These barbed wire Emus represent the hundreds of indigenous soldiers who fought and died for a country that counted them as flora and fauna in national census data

In Aboriginal Dreamtime religion, the souls of the dead use the Southern Cross to navigate to the afterlife
The souls of the Indigenous soldiers who fought and died in the Northern Hemisphere will forever wander the battlefields of Gallipoli, Palestine, France and the countless other places where Australian blood was spilled, unable to pass to the afterlife
They paid the ultimate sacrifice

Lest we forget

[runic ermine]

It's a shame that there was an unfortunate interpretation in one of the ceremonies
https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/world/australian-politicians-lambast-neo-nazi-hecklers-at-anzac-day-memorial-service/ar-AA1DBs4U

[sage fern]

Anyone got a class designation for soviet battleship SN Kazan?

All I can find on her is a yasen-class nuclear sub built in the 90s...

Assuming she's completely made up, since even PRs have blueprints and proposed specs?

[subtle prawn]

She's based on the Project 21 battleship design AKA Lenin if you play WoWS

[cyan oriole]

where is this from?

[twilit geyser]

Russian Nelson lol

[runic ermine]

https://x.com/SCCambuurLwd/status/1915635632933945728?s=19

SC Cambuur (@SCCambuurLwd) on X

Opdat wij niet vergeten 🕊️

#CAMVIT | Presented by Unibet

X · Apr 25, 2025, 5:15 AM

[desert agate]

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JtsvAFcp24Q

[muted dove]

I just found out that HMS Vanguard was the last Battleship ever built, I think know roughly why they stopped building Battleships (because carriers were superior?) but when did USA and UK realize that the era of battleships was over? Was it a definitive battle/moment or gradual?

[remote monolith]

battleships for the most part lost their relevance post-WWII since advances in air power made even the most heavily armed battleships highly vulnerable to concentrated air attacks

modernizing them to be on par is significantly more expensive and extensive as well than to simply build up carrier arms or alternative sources of anti-carrier platforms

paging @spiral cedar for more indepth stuff because I am not a strong naval man

[spiral cedar]

Battleships and carriers don't have identical roles in a fleet--a battleship during the World Wars was the ultimate surface combatant, meant to force an enemy to cede sea control of an area by physically occupying that space (or by being stationed nearby and threatening a sortie).

By contrast, an aircraft carrier's role evolved over time. First they were meant to scout the enemy fleet (to enable the clash of surface fleets, ideally from a condition of advantage), then to provide fighter cover (CAP) to shoot down enemy scouts and spotters, then eventually to perform strikes of their own against the enemy carrier (since establishing air superiority is most easily obtained by sinking the enemy carrier), and eventually into performing independent raids against enemy land and sea targets, as well as weakening enemy surface fleets before the clash of battlelines. This evolution is tightly tied to technological advances in aviation technology, which was in a faster rate of flux relative to changes in shipbuilding (since planes were a less mature engineering field). This change from the 1920s to the mid-1940s spanned the Second World War, where aircraft carriers (and, more importantly, their aircraft) improved to the point where they could fill all the above roles--albeit under the right conditions (mostly weather, sea state, and time of day). However, note this is still a different role from that of a battleship--if the enemy surface fleet shows up at night and you can't beat them in a surface fight, your carriers are going to be forced to flee, ceding the immediate sea control to the enemy (and unlike featureless tabletops, most naval battles happen in support of a land operation and thus you are abandoning your transports to the enemy).

So carriers have a role, and limitations. But they also have advantages no other surface combatant has, which fundamentally started to alter the nature of naval tactics and operations. Most notably, they allowed you to engage the enemy fleet even if they did not want to fight. A crucial conundrum throughout naval military history is how to force a weaker enemy to fight your stronger fleet and be crushed. While speeds of ships varied over time, it is usually difficult to force an enemy that does not want to fight to do so, since they can simply flee back to port (and exposing your expensive ships, which take years to build, to enemy shore artillery and mines that take weeks to build, is a bad strategic trade-off). Thus why so few battleship actions happened throughout history--battleships influenced naval strategy and operations by their presence in the region, but weaker enemies usually chose to cede sea control without a fight rather than lose a battle and then lose sea control anyway--and why many naval battles happen either in support of a land objective (because running away may be worse than risking part of your fleet) or as a result of surprise (many night battles, for example) or being trapped by terrain.

Carriers, by contrast, totally upend this dynamic--while guns reach out a dozen miles, aircraft can reach out hundreds of miles, beyond the horizon. And while the difference between a fast warship and a slow warship may be ten knots, a bomber is hundreds of knots faster than even the fastest warship. This means a carrier can damage or sink ships (weather permitting) even if the enemy wants to avoid a direct battle, which allows carriers to impose a very steep cost on enemy naval presence within its strike range. This "zoning" ability allows it to establish sea denial separately from sea control--sure you can't fully protect a convoy of transports from a far distance with some aircraft alone against a determined air/surface/submerged attack, but you can certainly stop the enemy from getting their convoy through the same area. And by imposing a material and attritional cost on lingering within strike range, the side with carrier superiority can exert greater control on the course of a naval operation as both sides seek to achieve their objectives in a region. This 'cost' is highly aviation-tech dependent, so while a 1920s fleet would not greatly fear the presence of an enemy CV over the horizon, for a 1945 fleet it might be their primary concern.

Throughout WWII, battleships and carriers both played important (and distinct) fleet roles. However, we also know that the war saw increasing carrier construction and decreasing battleship construction. Were battleships being 'replaced?'

Not exactly, at least not during WWII. The concept to understand is not that one is 'better' than the other, but rather for a given cost, how much better will your fleet be from one additional BB versus one additional CV (and its aircraft)? We don't make a meal by saying that pizza is the 'best' food and then only eating pizza--we have to create a balanced meal, so we need some salad, some fries, some pizza, some ice cream, and so forth. If you have too little of one for the right balance, you get more of that one. Cost plays a role, too--if the price of ice cream makes it too expensive to be worth it, you will have to find a more cost-effective dessert to fill the dessert role. This is the concept of marginal cost and marginal benefit--how much do I gain from one more?

So too with ship construction. While battleships have higher up-front costs, their long-term cost is actually usually lower (since carriers require planes and planes are incredibly expensive to maintain and fuel even if they're relatively cheap to make), so we shouldn't assume the shift is due only to cost. Rather, we have to look at the navies of the world in the 1930s and 1940s--these were navies that had sizable legacy fleets of battleships (even if treaty-restricted) but very few aircraft carriers. It's an unbalanced meal! So when the treaty system falls apart, there's a recognition by the three biggest navies (UK US JPN) that in light of rapidly advancing aircraft technology, they urgently need more carriers (they build battleships too, but the carriers will make up a much larger % of the future fleet than in the treaty era). Is this because battleships are getting worse? No, they still fill different roles and are still being built. But you don't need as many new ones--a 10 year old treaty battleship is still a considerable threat to an equally old enemy treaty battleship and anything smaller (e.g. cruisers), but if your navy has only 2 aircraft carriers and the enemy is going to have 8 (new, bigger ones that can carry bigger planes) in the next decade, you're in big trouble.

Then, World War II breaks out earlier than any of the navies really planned for during their post-treaty construction planning. So the long-term naval construction is going to be limited, since everyone needs lots of cheap, quick-to-build escorts in the next months more than fancy big ships that will take years to finish (by which point you may have already lost the war). So there's even more pressure to free up construction slipways by scrapping planned big ships (like BBs and CVs) in favor of more smaller ships. So how to decide what gets cut? By this point, aviation tech is improving by leaps and bounds, and you still are low on carriers relative to what you need for a balanced fleet, so most of the cuts are going to be to BBs instead of CVs. So, gradually, the world stops building many more BBs but continues to build CVs. For the US/UK, they still have sizable legacy fleets of BBs, so this is fine--and for the Axis navies, they are destroyed (besides Italy, but they don't have CVs so they aren't part of this discussion) so it doesn't matter anyway.

Then how about postwar? Well, the US and UK don't have any rivals with serious battleship forces anymore, so their battleships lose a lot of their purpose--with postwar budget cuts as severe as they are, a 2000-man battleship crew is going to be hard to afford compared to two cruiser crews that can patrol two areas at once (and the combat advantage is moot since the Soviet battleship fleet is either ancient or about-to-be-cancelled). So battleship production halts (some continue to receive upgrades, e.g. Jean Bart is actually completed well into the Cold War and is the last battleship finished though not the last one to start construction). But CV production is actually very important, due to jet aircraft--old wooden flight decks can't survive the weight of repeated new, heavy jet takeoffs and landings (and the hangars need to be taller), and thus new generations of CVs will be required (eating up a lot of that large-ship construction budget already tight in postwar years). So gradually over time, the battleship forces are left in stasis, as the oldest ships are mothballed and eventually scrapped, while the CV fleets are rejuvenated by the need to build new ones optimized for jets. This, again, is less that carriers are better at being battleships and more that battleships lack an enemy to make their large size and cost make sense in a budget-restricted environment.

However, technological changes are again going to change the dynamics. Carriers are going to gradually become more capable, in particular with night operations (experimented with during WWII) becoming a common carrier capability during the Cold War. This closes a major (half the day) gap in carrier usefulness relative to battleships. Just as crucially, a new technology will replace the gun as the primary surface combat weapon: the guided missile. Whereas a gun rapidly loses hit chance over distance, a guided missile's accuracy is much less affected by travel distance, making them much more capable near the edges of their range compared to guns. Missiles also allow surface ships to adequately deal with the new aircraft weapon, the guided bomb--whereas guns simply can't reliably hit planes at ranges where guided airdropped standoff munitions are effective, guided missiles can directly threaten the plane and thus defend the ship against aerial attacks.