The crazy entertainments of the patricians were not limited to the arena of the Colosseum. On holidays, crowds of people flocked to the hillsides to watch. A sea battle of gladiators with the participation of dozens of galleys and thousands of fighters! This is the scope, this is the scale!
Today, friends, I suggest you break away from boring everyday life and, like the Roman patricians, simulate a hurricane battle. Not a drop of blood will be spilled here, but you will learn a lot of interesting facts about the ships.
Let's get started!
In the west - inundations of mist, to the east it rained like a wall … TASK FORCE 58, the most powerful squadron ever plowed the ocean, unfolded along a front ten miles wide. It was under her blows that the famous Yamato fell.
But damn it! Why is there a squat silhouette of a ship similar to Iowa instead of a beveled pipe and a characteristic "deflection" of the upper deck?
It looks like the task has become more complicated. In the eyes of the pilots, uncertainty shines through, drops of sticky fear run down their spines. There is something to be afraid of!
Short script: do or die
The formation led by the battleship (let's call it conditionally "red") has an important task. Which? Choose yourself, according to your taste. Deliver a shipment of biological weapons to Okinawa. Evacuate the Emperor's family. Run aground and, turning into an impregnable battery, wear down the American troops with fire. Basically, what's the difference.
The Japanese "Iowa" rushes forward, the American aircraft carriers ("blue") have the task of stopping this attack
Here is a group of interesting facts for you at once, with a running start.
The power plant "Yamato" gave out on afterburner 158 thousand hp
The value of the Iowa power plant achieved in practice was 221 thousand hp (the tests stopped at 87% of the calculated value, the Yankees decided to save the resource of the mechanisms).
As you can see, the "Iowa" with a much lower displacement (~ 55 versus 70 thousand tons) had 1, 4 times more power on the propeller shafts!
The power density of the Iowa was 4 hp / t versus 2.2 hp / t for the Japanese monster.
What is it fraught with?
A sharp increase in speed? Not at all. The speed of the ship and the power of the power plant are related by a cubic relationship. To double your travel speed, you need eight times more powerful rig! Therefore, the "Iowa" was only slightly faster than the "Yamato" (31, 9 knots with an incomplete power plant - against 27, 7 for the Japanese).
The power of the power plant did not affect the circulation diameter. By the way, the largest battleships, Iowa and Yamato, were distinguished by phenomenal maneuverability. The Iowa's tactical circulation diameter at full speed was less than that of the destroyer; it was only 740 meters. It is no coincidence that after the reactivation of Iowa in the 1980s. instructions were issued for the crews of modern ships. So that they do not flatter themselves about the external clumsiness of the battleship - with a sharp change in course, he could ram the escort ships.
The main question remains : which was influenced by twice as large beats. Iowa's power versus Yamato? The answer is dynamics.
Dodging torpedo bombers, the Yamato could make a sharp turn with a 50% loss in speed. But only once. Dial 25-27 knots again. became a long problem, and it was a sentence.
In numbers, it looks like this.
Speed gain from 15 to 27 knots. for the formation, which consisted of LK N. Caroline and South Dakota, took 19 minutes.
For the Iowa formation, the acceleration from 15 to 27 knots took only 7 minutes. Almost three times faster!
It is worth noting that in terms of specific power, North Caroline and Sodak were close analogues of Yamato, only slightly surpassing the latter.
This is getting interesting, isn't it?
NINE LIVES
Due to their size, the steel giants never complained of a lack of survivability. According to the recollections of the surviving Japanese sailors and US Navy pilots, the Yamato and Musashi kept their speed even after six torpedoes hit one side!
Indirectly, this conclusion is confirmed by the Shinano, which continued to move for seven hours after being hit by four torpedoes, despite unpressurized bulkheads and the absence of any damage control.
It turns out that six torpedoes in one side are just the beginning. The ship does not lose stability and does not even try to sink. Turbines are running. Generators generate current. All electric drives are functioning. The wounded animal continues to move towards the target and is able to snap back fire.
The main thing is to stretch the time and hold out until dark.
To put it more easily, if the torpedo bombers do not manage to deliver more than six strikes during daylight hours, then their task has failed. The target escaped.
During the night, the crew will extinguish the fires, straighten out a dangerous bank, reinforce the bulkheads, and have time to restore some of the mechanisms and weapons.
By the next morning, he will be in close proximity to the target, where help awaits him. The task is completed. The battleship with honor broke through the screen of eight ABs.
In reality, Yamato could not do this. But a different type of battleship could have done it (like the more perfect Iowa)?
This question is at the heart of today's marine detective story.
* * *
Despite the sacrificial resilience of the Yamato, the Iowa was more adapted to survive under air fire. There are several reasons for this:
1. Limited use of the electric drive in the Yamato design. The cunning Japanese used auxiliary steam engines wherever possible: this simplified the network layout and eliminated the danger of short circuits.
But the Japanese outwitted themselves: valves and pipelines turned out to be more vulnerable than cable routes (the wires did not react to strong shocks). The use of steam did not allow duplicating drives. And most importantly, the battleship became completely helpless when stopping the boilers (this is most clearly seen in the example of "Musashi").
2. Energy.
Yamato was supplied with electricity from 4 turbine generators and 4 standby diesel generators with a total capacity 4800 kW.
Electricity for Iowa was generated by 8 turbine generators and 2 diesel generators with a total capacity 10,500 kW.
Yes … the problem of lack of energy clearly did not threaten her.
Even having lost half of the generators, the American battleship retained the ability to conduct combat and continue the struggle for its survivability.
3. Power plant layout
Boiler rooms and engine rooms "Yamato" occupied 50 meters of the length of the hull.
Two echelons of the Iowa Power Plant stretched for 100 meters! In order to "knock out" all eight compartments with boilers and GTZA, it was necessary to turn the entire citadel between the bow and stern turrets of the main battery. One torpedo will definitely not be enough there. And two too.
By the way, "Yamato" was also not simple - its power plant had a four-row arrangement, in which the onboard units covered two inner rows of boilers and a gas turbine engine. However, with such a dense layout, there was a threat of damage to mechanisms, ruptures of steam lines and displacement of units from the beds from shocks with close hits from torpedoes.
The Iowa scheme looks preferable and once again contributes to better survivability of the battleship.
* * *
We are deliberately not considering the booking scheme. In the situation under consideration, the protection of both battleships was equally effective in countering air attack weapons.
We can only note a more rational scheme of protection "Iowa", whose armored citadel had a continuation in the stern. And, besides, fewer problems caused by the destruction and flooding of the unarmored bow tip (due to its smaller size compared to the Yamato tip).
The battleship can be bombed until the end of time, until the enemy guesses to strike below the waterline.
None of the anti-torpedo protection schemes (PTZ) provided flooding prevention. The large width of the Yamato PTZ (7 meters versus 5.45 for Iowa) was devalued by the weakness of some critical elements (shear rivets are the most disadvantageous type of stress). The I-beams supporting the bulkhead of the PTZ turned into deadly "battering rams" during the explosion, which only exacerbated the damage. Also, the width of the PTZ had significant fluctuations in the depth and length of the hull. So, in the area of the second tower of the Civil Code, the width of the PTZ of the great "Yamato" was only 2.6 meters.
With torpedo hits, survivability was determined not by the thickness of the PTZ, but by the layout of the compartments, the impermeability of the bulkheads and the number of el. generators on board, without which the fight for survivability loses all possibility and meaning.
According to the totality of the facts, "Iowa" had a definite advantage over the Japanese battleship. Formally being the same age, these ships belonged to different technological eras.
And even if the advantage in terms of "survivability" is not as bright and obvious as in the dynamics and density of anti-aircraft fire. But these subtle "little things" would ultimately help stretch out time and slow the spread of damage.
The fire that started it all and ended it
On that day, April 7, 1945, the sky, angry with the sinful earth, brought down a wall of fire.
8 aircraft carriers, 386 planes raised on alarm (of which 50 got lost and did not reach the target; in fact, two waves of 227 carrier-based fighters, bombers and torpedo bombers took part in the sinking).
The Yamato responded by sending them 9 tons of hot steel per minute.
For comparison: the mass of a minute volley of Iowa anti-aircraft guns was 18 tons.
The data on the density of fire does not give a complete picture. Here are a couple more facts.
Fact number 1. The horizontal guidance speed of the Yamato universal installations is 16 degrees / sec.
For five-inch "Iowa" cars - 25 degrees / sec.
After all, this is a key parameter in the fight against bombers that deliberately enter from a diametrical direction. What makes it difficult for the calculations of anti-aircraft guns, so fast is the angular displacement of targets.
Fact number 2. During the Second World War, the Yankees managed to create radio tubes that withstand an overload of 20,000 g. This is how ammunition with the Mark-53 radar fuse appeared. Simply put, a mini-radar was installed inside each projectile.
When the reflected signal became strong enough (nearby - an enemy aircraft), the projectile exploded, filling the space with fragments.
According to statistics, the use of radio fuses reduced the consumption of five-inch rounds per shot down plane from 2 to 5 times (depending on the type of target and its flight profile).
The Japanese had nothing like an American radar fuse. Antiaircraft projectiles were equipped with a conventional Type 91 remote fuse with a variable burst time from 0 to 55 s and a safety delay of 0.4 s to prevent a burst near the ship.
Fact number 3. The Japanese 25-mm anti-aircraft machine guns were powered from 15-round box magazines.
The 20-mm Erlikonov was fed from disk magazines with a capacity of 60 rounds. Four times the length of the continuous line!
As a result, the practical rate of fire of "Erlikon" was 250-320 rounds / min (taking into account the time to reload). For Japanese anti-aircraft guns, this parameter was only 110-120 rds / min.
Fact number 4. In addition to universal 127 mm guns and six dozen small-caliber anti-aircraft guns, American battleships regularly carried 19 quad Bofors installations (76 barrels).
The 40-mm artillery system successfully complemented the bulky large-caliber anti-aircraft guns, at the same time, its shells were five times the mass of the shots of Japanese 25-mm machine guns!
The rate of fire was 120 rds / min. at large and 140-160 rds / min. at low elevation angles of trunks. Thanks to the cage power supply (4-projectile clips), the rate of fire of the Bofors approached the Japanese MZA half the caliber. Loaders continuously inserted new clips into the receiver, without wasting time replacing magazines. As a result, the heavy machine gun did 80-100 rounds / min.
As for the Japanese assault rifles, despite their number, they combined only the shortcomings of the Bofors and Erikons.
Nobody claims that these systems could shoot down hundreds of aircraft per second. But the use of shells with a radio fuse, twice the density of the MZA fire, the power and firing range of the Bofors installations created a new spectrum of threats to aircraft.
In addition to the undoubtedly higher losses of the attacking side, these measures would make it difficult to launch the attack and reduce the accuracy of bombing and torpedo release.
It is impossible to predict the outcome of the battle, but there was a precedent in history - a battle at Fr. Santa Cruz. In which the battleship "S. Dakota "(in general, identical to" Iowa "in terms of air defense) and the destroyers that were part of the formation put an entire air regiment into expenditure. After leaving the attack, the samurai missed 26 aircraft, and without any noticeable result (only one bomb hit was recorded on the "S. Dakota").
In general, the more advanced battleships of the US Navy operated in conditions of absolute numerical superiority and never got into situations like the Sho-Go operations (the Yamato suicide campaign). So they failed to accumulate the necessary statistical data.
But indirect evidence makes you wonder …
Everything we have, we either deserve or allow
The story does not claim scientific awards. We do not have data for a comprehensive comparison and drawing far-reaching conclusions. We only know that we are dealing with many times more mobile and tenacious "target", with the next generation air defense systems.
Figuratively speaking, if we became participants in the modern "navmachia", and we would be offered to make a big bet? I think that many of those who are shouting how easily the Yamato was sunk will no longer dare to put on aviation in the confrontation with Iowa.
Perhaps in the near future, a home supercomputer will simulate the situation taking into account all the conditions and infinite parameters that make up a sea battle. We will get an exact answer to such a childish, but so adult-like interesting question.
It is hoped that today's story, wrapped in a fantastic action movie, has expanded your knowledge of naval history and ship design.
