Sinking Battleships with GWX

[the dark knight]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

Very good explanations, and very nice drawings, but you make some assertions I must challenge, even at the risk of derailing the thread. Of course I could argue that you already did that by bringing up the sidenotes in the first place.


This bulkhead was also very light, designed only to keep splinters from the outer hull and the torpedo itself from going through. In the case of Yamato one torpedo was observed to go through the hole already made by another. It almost certainly detonated against this splinter bulkhead and caused major damage and flooding.


Quite true. In fact one type of protection scheme had the bulges already flooded, so there could be no water coming in to cause offside flooding.


Those experts say the torpedoes did not deliver the hoped-for coup-de-gras. But they also say that she certainly would have sunk within the day. Both torpedoes and scuttling were attempts to prevent the other side from salvaging the ship and scoring a moral victory. British shellfire certainly did sink Bismarck. Or to put it more accurately, destroyed her.



The main difference is that all three battlecruisers at Jutland took turret hits, which would not have flashed down to the magazines if they had not adopted the procedure of locking the anti-flash doors open to increase the rate of fire. It's fairly certain that none of them took penetrating magazine hits.


Is there any evidence that a submarine torpedo ever did that to a battleship? Most of the sinkings I'm aware of were due to fires spreading to the magazine long after the original strike. I believe the game has it completely wrong there.

Oh, and a side-note: The plural is "torpedoes".

Okay, I should have said in theory with the underwater protection systems and how they were supposed to work. I doubt they are modeled in game anyway.

In real life, no. I have never seen any evidence that torpedoes could cause magazines to explode. However, it seems to work in SHIII. The game is completely wrong.

I could have sworn I had read (and maybe the book I am thinking of was wrong, or I am ms-remembering), said that the British Battlecruisers took penetrating hits to the roofs from plunging fire, and this allowed the shell to hit the ammo. Like I said, it was a long time ago, and I could very well be wrong. It is all good!

In a way, yes. I will agree the British did cause the circumstances to unfold to force the scuttling of Bismarck. You could make the argument that they sank her due to those circumstances.