Wildstar:
>Immediately prior to the first World War, Admiral Fisher of the Royal
>Navy procured the HMS Dreadnought, the world's first all-big gun
>battleship. The main armament was a relatively large number (10 I
>believe) of identical large guns. Guns were to fire in salvoe (all
>together) so that the fall of the shot could be easily observed, and
>the aim corrected. Having all of the same type of gun made this much
>easier (it is quite difficult to estimate which gun fired the shot
>based on the size of the splash of a miss, at a range of several
>thousand yards).
Almost. The Dreadnought fired one gun from each turret in its
"broadside", alternating. This way the rate of fire of the battery
could be high enough that meaningful corrections could be made.
I also question the description of eight years prior to WW1 (the
Dreadnought was commissioned in 1906) as "immediately prior to the
First World War", but that's just me being picky again... :-)
Will is almost right about the Japs, though. The ships in question were
several dozen Japanese LIGHT cruisers, which were built so that the 6"
main guns could quickly be replaced by 8" guns. These changes were made
as soon as the Naval Treaties of the inter-war years broke down, and
gave the Japanese a considerable advantage in numbers of heavy cruisers
in the early part of the war. Well, it would have been an advantage if
the Japanese had had the same Treaty limits the USA and Britain had.
Since they were allowed under Treaty considerably fewer heavy cruisers,
what it actually gave them was parity with the USA and Britain much
sooner than was expected when the Naval race got started good.
---Steve