Quote:
Originally Posted by iambecomelife
It's very funny how irresponsible the Royal Navy was with tripod mast placement. Even after they discovered the problem with smoke interference, dreadnoughts like "Orion" and "Colossus" still had their tripod masts placed behind the funnel. Long range gunnery is hard enough without hot smoke suffocating you & blocking your view. German dreadnoughts, OTOH, never had this ridiculous feature.
|
What's really weird is the reason behind it - boat cranes. They didn't want to add separate cranes to hoist the boats out, so they put the tripod mast closer to the boats, and behind the forward funnel.
This, coupled with the bad positioning of the aft rangefinder, meant that Dreadnought was effectively blind at any speed above about 10 knots until extra rangefinders were mounted on the compass platform and 'A' turret in 1912.
@ Hitman and Sledgehammer: I pointed out that it was Bellerophon in post #505.
