How did the battleships manage to hit their targets before radar was invented?It seems utterly insane to think that they somehow managed to fight battles 10 km apart from each other relying only on eyesight and mathematical calculation
>>14770033People used mechanical computers. Also any calculations solutions could be find in books full of solved formulas by computer ladies calculating all day long.
>>14770033You have a team of officers who use sliderules to calculate, then you observe fall of shot to see how close you came to hitting and what adjustments you need to make.
>>14770033Range finders and simple trigonometry.
A shell from the IJN Yamato travelled 18 miles and crippled USS White Plains
>>14770033>How did the battleships manage to hit their targets before radar was invented?optical range finding, and some fairly sophisticated mathematical calculations on mechanical computers, hit rates werent great, the best shooting units at jutland managed about 5% hit rate, although part of that problem was that even if you had all the guns dead on target and the range correct against a stationary target a full broadside is still going to be landing in a lozenge shaped pattern, not dead on target as minor variations in powder charge and shell have some effect on a shells trajectory, even in ww2 with accurate guns and radar accurate shooting meant getting your pattern over the enemy and hoping at least one actually connected known as a straddle.
>>14770033math
>>14770033navigation on a ship already requires a lot of math, they just applied to arty
>>14770033They also had telescopes and other devices which helped them gauge the effective firing range of turrets, which involved basic geometry. Naval combat is essentially a game which involves firing a weapon while simultaneously accounting for transversal velocity. If you know how fast your target is moving, and how fast + far your own weapon travels, you can become pretty damned accurate by simply eyeballing the target and accounting for distance + velocity.
>>14770033There were optical rangefinders and fire control directors that calculated the range and speed of the target, the direction based on wind, air density, and waves of the sea, and the ballistic drop of the target itself while it was moving.
>>14770033math is helluva drug
>>14771359nice answer completely ruined by the inappropriate pic(un)rel.
>>14770321>crippled USS White Plainslol, no.
>>14770033skill issue
>>14771799thats a coincidence rangefinder, the one of the common methods of optical rangefinding
After enough practice you just know. Kinda like how basketball players can make three pointers.
Post late 1800s - early 1900s warships.This is the SMS Ostfriesland. Launched in 1911, it served as the flagship of the 1st Division of the First Battle Squadron of the High Seas Fleet during WWI.
>>14772447for me, it's french pre-dreadnoughts
The pre-WWI era of steel warships is kino as fuck. Surprised Hollywood doesn't make a big budget film about the 1905 Battle of Tsushima, the greatest naval battle between battleships. Especially with the anti-Russian atmosphere.
>>14773338the japs did a miniserie I think, it definitely deserves a blockbuster budget adaptation though. Same with Trafalgar, Lissa and Jutland
>>14774512
>>14774521
>>14774529
>>14773381>the japs did a miniserieName, and is it subbed?
>>14774512quite amazing how the biggest one got rekt by a single shot
>>14770033barely
>>14774633Hood? Yeah, one very lucky strike completely fucked her up.
>>14772447>>14773303>Mogs you to the point of rendering you laughably obsolete overnight and creating its own era of naval design
>>14774820>Only builds a couple and completely shits the bed when everyone else starts building their own.
>>14774794to be fair to Hood, she was pretty out of date by that point and was scheduled for a refit, only reason she was even deployed was because they needed another ship that could keep pace with Bismark
>>14770033ITT: You find out why your parents insisted you learn maths.
>>14774855I mean I wouldn't even say that, she was still a great ship but having a 380-mm shell smash into your 4 inch magazine and having that set off your main magazine will fuck any ship up. The brit's weren't even doing something stupid at the time like keeping the flash doors open, it was just a good hit.
>>14774512Man, HMS Rodney was so fucking ugly. Not only all 3 turrets being in front but being in the atrocious-looking low-high-low arrangement.
>>14775294They were ment to have conventional layout,but the Washington treaty limited their size,and the hood class were planned as Baltic sea raiders
>>14773303Some of the most legendary boondoggles in the history of naval warfare, and that’s really saying something
By sheer luck. Battleship warfare has very poor hit rate.
>>14775294The Hood and the Rodney were meant to combine into one large battleship.
>>14775294Nelson and Rodney might not have been conventionally pretty but they still look great. Exactly as a battleship should, like a floating castle with some huge guns ready to spoil your day.
>>14774820Stupidest thing the Royal Navy ever did. HMS Dreadnought made the entire fleet obsolete, and they didn't build nearly enough to recover their pre-HMS Dreadnought advantage. That's how you get embarrassments like Jutland, that and being obsessed with battlecruisers aka floating tinderboxes
>>14774905>The brit's weren't even doing something stupid at the time like keeping the flash doors open, it was just a good hit.We actually don't know that, but obviously the official story is that nobody on Hood did anything wrong and Bismarck just got super lucky.
>>14774512>Prinz Eugen>battleshipHood I can understand, it's not a battleship but it looks like one. But Prinz is just a heavy cruiser.
>>14771803Crippled might not be the right word, considering that USS White Plains was able to stay active during the subsequent battle, but her hull actually sustained severe damage and she was sent off for immediate repairs right after the battle. Interestingly, the one shell that heavily damaged her hull didn't even hit her, but splashed into the water a good distance away. Its explosion was still powerful enough to wreck the hull. Yamato's shells were no joke.
>>14776198Hood was essentially a fast battleship, the battlecruiser title the RN used is misleading, she didn't really trade armour for speed compared to contemporary battleships, she's just really large instead.
>>14776244That's a bit debatable. Hood's armor protection was seriously lacking compared to modern fast battleships, especially when it comes to horizontal protection. I think it's more accurate to describe her as an unusually large and well-armored battlecruiser.
>>14777219>compared to modern fast battleshipsThere's no sense in comparing her to anything other than her contemporaries in this regard when Hood came along so much earlier than other "true" fast battleships. When comparing Hood to contemporary battleships her overall level of protection is quite similar in many regards as well as the percentage of her overall displacement dedicated to armour.
>Hoodpostingstep aside, real VGH... worthy design coming through
>>14777762I fucking wish we got the G3s, not only do I like how they look but considering the time for which they were designed and intended to be built, they would have been absolutely wild
>>14777762That looks even stupider than the Nelson-class
>>14770033Binoculars>Do it again but a bit to the left
>>14778013What's wrong with it? Besides the third turret not being higher than the second.
