Well, there's a reason BB typically didn't have/lost their torpedo tubes. Against lighter ships, there's no reason to risk a torpedo battle at closer ranges when your BB-grade guns have multiple kms of extra range over their lighter guns. Against other BBs, you have to close over 10km of range (long lance range ~ 20km, 14in guns effective range ~ 30km) while only using your forward guns. But the enemy BB can respond with full broadsides. In practice, that distance is even greater since no BB was equipped with long lances. To add onto that, torpedos are more likely to suffer from ammo explosions, especially long lances. Just ask Chokai how she lost a gun battle against an escort carrier. Overall, it just doesn't make sense to put torpedo tubes on anything larger than a light cruiser.

It was also the difference in long term planning and situations.

The German navy always assumed that it would engage in a blockade against England and/or engage the British navy. That meant an anti-battleship fleets and long range blockade/interceptor ships. (Production never really started, air power eventually changed the game and the rest is history)

By comparison, the Japanese navy planned for air superiority to make up for their inability to produce (and supply) a battleship fleet capable of going head-to-head with American battleships. Cue the Japanese loss of air superiority and it was all downhill from there.

Pretty much everyone did this during WWI, but Britain didn't actually remove them from all of their ships before WII began (The Nelsons and Hood both still had them). Rodney in fact fired about a dozen torpedoes from her (underwater) tube at Bismark after the range got down and pretty much all the latter's weapons had been knocked out of action. One of these actually hit making her the only BB in history to torpedo another.

Of course the Iowa's are off in a corner snickering at all of them with their anti-ship missile launchers.

MMaestro said:

It was also the difference in long term planning and situations.

The German navy always assumed that it would engage in a blockade against England and/or engage the British navy. That meant an anti-battleship fleets and long range blockade/interceptor ships. (Production never really started, air power eventually changed the game and the rest is history)

Uh no, not really. Germany never really planned for some grand showdown with Royal Navy as even the most optimistic estimates indicated it would take into the late 40s if not early 50s to come even close to gaining parity, and even then only if the naval programs whre given much higher priority then they ever got even before the war began. In reality the more pragmatic leaders of the Navy where focused on maximizing the potential annoyance factor of the ships they did have via means of commerce raiding, or even just it's potential.

There playing around with diesel engines and other propulsion technologies and cramming very large guns on fast/small hulls was to try and extend range for long distance, unsupported raiding operations and to gain superiority over the lighter escorts likely to be encountered. The fitting or purposed fitting of torpedo to capital scale vessels was part of this as well, ruining a vessel with gunfire isn't that hard, but actually sinking it can be. The torpedo were chiefly intended as a time and resource saver as a single torpedo delivered against a more or less sitting duck merchant was virtually assured to sink it with far less time and precious resources expended then riddling it with gunfire for half an hour.

By comparison, the Japanese navy planned for air superiority to make up for their inability to produce (and supply) a battleship fleet capable of going head-to-head with American battleships. Cue the Japanese loss of air superiority and it was all downhill from there.

And this is flat out wrong too.

The Japanese were almost laughably obsessed with engaging the US navy in some giant Jutland style nearly pure surface engagement with their battle line. They had a number of things they thought would even the odds that ranged from useful (focus on night fighting, better torpedoes, ignoring treaties to build heavy cruisers 50% larger then the US), to questionable (an increasing obsession with 'outraging' the enemy and higher speed at the expense of protection), to downright stupid ('diving' shells, midget submarines, the 70,000 ton white Elephant that was The Hotel). Notice what isn't their. Japanese naval air power emerged as preeminent, much like in the US Navy, rather in spite of backwards thinking and poorly allocated resources going into the war not because of a focused effort to produce it.

Both navies largely blundered into having easily the most powerful naval air forces on the planet thanks to a few forward thinking officers who managed to work around the backwards big-gun brass, and in fact the two forces that went into war were extremely evenly matched. For all the press the 'elite' Japanese Naval Aviators get the USN fliers were also fairly easily the most highly trained and skilled fliers in any of the US armed forces at the start of the war and the IJN never once managed to trade better then even against the USN.

Tk3997 said:
Uh no, not really. Germany never really planned for some grand showdown with Royal Navy as even the most optimistic estimates indicated it would take into the late 40s if not early 50s to come even close to gaining parity, and even then only if the naval programs whre given much higher priority then they ever got even before the war began. In reality the more pragmatic leaders of the Navy where focused on maximizing the potential annoyance factor of the ships they did have via means of commerce raiding, or even just it's potential.

There playing around with diesel engines and other propulsion technologies and cramming very large guns on fast/small hulls was to try and extend range for long distance, unsupported raiding operations and to gain superiority over the lighter escorts likely to be encountered. The fitting or purposed fitting of torpedo to capital scale vessels was part of this as well, ruining a vessel with gunfire isn't that hard, but actually sinking it can be. The torpedo were chiefly intended as a time and resource saver as a single torpedo delivered against a more or less sitting duck merchant was virtually assured to sink it with far less time and precious resources expended then riddling it with gunfire for half an hour.

Of course they never really planned for a massive showdown with the Royal Navy, but that was for practicality reasons (how far did Operation Sea Lion get?). The Nazi party didn't have full control until the early 1930s and by the late 1930s, the writing was on the wall: War was HERE and long term plans were scrapped/swapped/converted to shorter, more quickly deployed plans.

I phrased that horribly.

And this is flat out wrong too.

The Japanese were almost laughably obsessed with engaging the US navy in some giant Jutland style nearly pure surface engagement with their battle line. They had a number of things they thought would even the odds that ranged from useful (focus on night fighting, better torpedoes, ignoring treaties to build heavy cruisers 50% larger then the US), to questionable (an increasing obsession with 'outraging' the enemy and higher speed at the expense of protection), to downright stupid ('diving' shells, midget submarines, the 70,000 ton white Elephant that was The Hotel). Notice what isn't their. Japanese naval air power emerged as preeminent, much like in the US Navy, rather in spite of backwards thinking and poorly allocated resources going into the war not because of a focused effort to produce it.

They were, but the Japanese Navy NEVER (significantly) deployed their battleships, even after the American battleships started to re-enter service. By comparison, the usage of aircraft carriers by the Japanese (when they had them) practically wrote the early years of the Pacific War.

The BELIEF may have been that there would be a massive battleship-vs-battleship engagement, but the subsequent lack of usage trumps what they had "planned" for (I'm pretty sure they never planned to be sitting on those battleships for almost 4 years)

Both navies largely blundered into having easily the most powerful naval air forces on the planet thanks to a few forward thinking officers who managed to work around the backwards big-gun brass, and in fact the two forces that went into war were extremely evenly matched. For all the press the 'elite' Japanese Naval Aviators get the USN fliers were also fairly easily the most highly trained and skilled fliers in any of the US armed forces at the start of the war and the IJN never once managed to trade better then even against the USN.

Yes, but thats pretty much what every military does. The British army blundered into armored cavalry by the end of WWI. Nearly everyone blundered into mechanized infantry in WWII. Some militaries are still blundering into combined arms.

Tk3997 said:

The Japanese were almost laughably obsessed with engaging the US navy in some giant Jutland style nearly pure surface engagement with their battle line. They had a number of things they thought would even the odds that ranged from useful (focus on night fighting, better torpedoes, ignoring treaties to build heavy cruisers 50% larger then the US), to questionable (an increasing obsession with 'outraging' the enemy and higher speed at the expense of protection), to downright stupid ('diving' shells, midget submarines, the 70,000 ton white Elephant that was The Hotel). Notice what isn't their. Japanese naval air power emerged as preeminent, much like in the US Navy, rather in spite of backwards thinking and poorly allocated resources going into the war not because of a focused effort to produce it.

Both navies largely blundered into having easily the most powerful naval air forces on the planet thanks to a few forward thinking officers who managed to work around the backwards big-gun brass, and in fact the two forces that went into war were extremely evenly matched. For all the press the 'elite' Japanese Naval Aviators get the USN fliers were also fairly easily the most highly trained and skilled fliers in any of the US armed forces at the start of the war and the IJN never once managed to trade better then even against the USN.

Well, what can we say? The Bomber and Battleship Cults wrecked the idea of airpower being used as anything other than a support to the battle line meaning that (meaningful) development only really started on effective carrier based aircraft around the early-mid thirties, and even then EVERYTHING that was produced for carriers, for every nation, was obsolete the second it rolled off the production line let alone when war broke out. I mean take the Dauntless and Devastator, they were slow, under defended and, in the case of the Devastator, lucky if they made it to the target without stalling under the weight of their own ordnance. The only reason the SBD stayed in service for so long is the same as the Zero; development setbacks.

And guess who dominated the navy that planned the above doctrines, and that Yamamoto had to plan a war for. Lucky him.

And it backs again, at least for Kongou.

dakight said:

And it backs again, at least for Kongou.

Nostalgia Battlecruiser.