mdiehl
Posts: 5998
Joined: 10/21/2000 Status: offline
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[QUOTE]When the USN designed the DE, it was to be powered by geared turbines. Yet gear production was unable to provide the necessary reduction boxes and turbine production could not meet demand. That is why you have DEs with turbo-electric (no reduction gears), diesel-electric (no turbines and reduction gearing with less tolerances) and diesel plants.[/QUOTE] Let's be clear about why DEs didn't have turbines. 1. They were expensive. 2. In a DE, which was primarily designed to escort support vessels, 30 knots was completely unnecessary, 3. Turbines of the day positively gulped fuel, reducing the already short legs of ships in the DD-DE size range. As it turned out, the best ASW vessels in the US arsenal were the Coast Guard's 327s. 8000 NM range, 21 knots top speed, very seaworthy, and ready made to accommodate 2x5", DC rails, Kguns, ahead throwns, 8x20mm and 3x40mm dualies. 4. The USN was cranking out DDs for pacific duty and these of necessity needed turbines. Why delay the production in DDs to put them in DEs taht don't need them? Putting together an extra turbine machine shop for a critical installation like Pearl would have been a cakewalk and it would not have set back new construction a microsecond. [QUOTE]As for tactical/strategic bombing, D3A1 dive bombers were quite accurate with 551lb GP bombs and the B5N2s were level bombing from low altitude compared to the efforts of the strategic bombing campaign.[/QUOTE] Not accurate enough to hit targets the size of a dinner plate, even if the pilots could see the targets through the smoke, AAA, and sweat at 250 mph. Dinner plate is about the size of most of the hypercritical targets, other than the oil tanks. [QUOTE]It is possible that during the bombing raid focused on installations that a vital capability would be severely damaged or destroyed.[/QUOTE] People keep saying this but have not yet been able to name a target that was easily destroyable that was not also easily replaceable. [QUOTE]In 1941, there was no reserve of such maintenance capabilities just sitting in storage somewhere.[/QUOTE] Wrong oh, friend. In 1941 the US was still operating substantially under capacity in factories already built and awaiting orders for production. Assuming the loss of machine shops at PH, any given suite of machine tools from thousands of industrial centers in the US could have been borrowed, shipped to PH, and remanufactured in the US in a month. [QUOTE]All such machinery and the trained operators were in maximum utilization levels in the building and modernization programs.... 42 to 45.[/QUOTE] All incorrect. [QUOTE]As far as oil fuel is concerned...[/QUOTE] Actually, you *can* just stick it in any container. It's not the best system, though, to fuel your P40 with old French gasoline filtered through cheesecloth by means of a hand pump attached to a 5 ig petrol can. An oil tank of the sort at PH is nothing more than a big cylinder. They're not difficult to make at all. Nothing complicated. Nothing terribly expensive or requring really delicate finely machined parts. The only limitation in all of this is the rate at which replacement stuff can be shipped to Hawaii, assuming that local materials like concrete, tin, wood, or chunks of half ruined oil tanks, can't be made to do the job. Let's see. AVGAS. Yeah, the Sovs ranked it highly in lend-lease because they weren't very good at making lots of 100 octane fuel and because much of the lend-lease equipment (aircraft and tanks) burned the stuff. The US was the home and inventor of 100 Octane fuel. The only limitation here, again, is the speed with which a tanker full of the stuff can be sent to PH to replace whatever is lost there. [QUOTE]This is not to say that an attack by 150 D3A1 and B5N2 carrier attack a/c would level all of PH, or even the installation maintenance plant. Yet the plant was concentrated next to the docks, would not be difficult to hit, and affords the possibility that an essential support function could be severely damaged or destroyed constraining USN operations for up to six months.[/QUOTE] Pure random speculation. Very nice to assert six months when you don't go into the details as to what there is to hit, what it takes to really destroy it, and how long it takes to replace it. To reiterate, German a/c plants with 75% of floor space damage were back in operation in a month. That damage represents HUNDREDS of 500 lb GP bombs striking a production facility the size of a couple soccor fields. The reason why these factories were rather easy to repair is because machine tools are freaking hard to destroy.
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Show me a fellow who rejects statistical analysis a priori and I'll show you a fellow who has no knowledge of statistics. Didn't we have this conversation already?
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