Local Yokel
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quote:
ORIGINAL: JWE
quote:
ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake
Interesting story. My question is this. Were they trying to save money by not hiring a naval architect? Surely the math for such a calcualtion (center of gravity) was well known and there must have been some standards to predict that kind of behavior.
Maybe they hired the same firm that did the Vasa design
It's not a story. Japan had excellent Naval Architects. There’s nothing magic about calculating a height of metacentric.
Thing is that the NAs did that, but after they laid out the box rule, IJNHQ came along and demanded double the weapons, double this, double that, all on the same hull.
The NAs screamed bloody murder and told IJNHQ exactly what would happen. What did IJNHQ do? It fired the NAs and promoted a lickspittle.
Evans & Peatie have a whole chapter about this in Kaigun. It’s really pathetic. A lot like that idiot Hitler and his super maus weapons; more and bigger is better, except, of course, when it's not. But the Japanese woke up after the Tomozuru and 5th fleet “incidents” – oh ! nan desu ka !
[edit] actually the Shiratsuyu was a pretty good design; she wasn't all that tender to begin with, and had a bit of roll recovery in reserve to accommodate some extra AA topside. Like the US DDs, doctrine was to engage broadside, so it didn't matter where her aft gun was trained at rest; she would have trained outboard in an engagement.
I assume JWE has in mind R Adm Fujimoto Kikuo in mind as the lickspittle in question! Evans and Peattie certainly say that he was a good deal more suggestible than his illustrious predecessor Hiraga Yuzuru. A look at Fujimoto's career path shows what seems to be a pretty meteoric rise from the rank of Constructor Commander (attained in December 1923) to his elevation at the age of 44 to Constructor Rear Admiral in the space of almost exactly 10 years, so maybe such suggestibility was the product of promotional inducements. He certainly paid a heavy price for his advancement, receiving much blame for the fallout resulting from the Tomozuru Incident. This probably played a large part in his early death on 9 Jan 1935, three days shy of his 47th birthday.
However, from what I've read the blame for the Hatsuharus' shortcomings should not be attributed to Fujimoto, unless he was responsible for determining the initial design response to the NGS' specification of its requirements for the new destroyer class. That specification called for only two triple TT mounts, yet the initial Hatsuharu design inexplicably included the third, elevated mount. Also, it was the designers' decision to incorporate a pair of heavy 40mm pom-poms when the NGS would apparently have settled for a much lighter AA weapon. Given that all this extra weight had to be accomodated within a standard displacement that was little more than four-fifths of the earlier Special Type destroyers, whoever cranked out the initial design for the new class seems to have suffered from a severe rush of blood to the head.
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