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The Starblazers' ship, the Yamato is the subject of NOVA Tuesday October 4th: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/supership/

I know there is an older thread about this ship, but I have started a new one, anyway.

There is a [url=[url=http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/supership/expl-flash.html]http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/supership/expl-flash.html[/url]]Flash anatomy of the ship[/url], and several other features on the site.

It will be amazing to watch such an indepth study, especially when so few details of the ships survived the war. They found the Yamato but no one has yet to find her sister ship off the Southern Phillipine islands.

That was something to watch.

Originally posted by dannavy85@Oct 5 2005, 01:41 PM
That was something to watch.

Yes it was.... Boy that thing was huge!!! what a useless deathtrap.

I taped it, but my ATI All in Wonder has been sick since Monday. The TV would not work, & when I tried to reinstall the software, the thing gave me THE BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH during the shut down process. If system restore fails, I will need to reinstall Windows for the umteenth time I think my Samsund DVD drive is causing the instability. <_<

It was larger than I thought. Seeing that 2-man sub dipping down into one of the turret holes and getting a sense of how big it was...each turret weighs as much as a destroyer and could toss a shell 29 miles?

But in the end, carriers made her a white elephant. But damn she was a graceful looking battlewagon.

Originally posted by dannavy85@Oct 5 2005, 08:39 PM
It was larger than I thought. Seeing that 2-man sub dipping down into one of the turret holes and getting a sense of how big it was...each turret weighs as much as a destroyer and could toss a shell 29 miles?

But in the end, carriers made her a white elephant. But damn she was a graceful looking battlewagon.

How does it compare to the Bismarck? That was another ship that was so big and bad that the first thing the Allies did was hunt it down & sink it. Such behemoths seemed to backfire, because their size and power, rather than making them kings of the hill, led to their immediate destruction. B) There is a German gun at the US Army Ordinance Museum in Aberdeen MD, but it only required 1 set of RR tracks. There was an even larger one that used parallel RR tracks & used a projectile about the same weight as a VW Bug. I do not recall how far, but with a crew of about 100 required to work the thing, it was just too inefficient.

On land, 4 M4 Sherman tanks were destroyed (on average) for every 1 Tiger knocked out. While the American tank crews paid the price, the fewer but more powerful Tiger tanks could not contend with the sheer numbers of tanks produced by the strongest economy on Earth. Whether tanks, planes, ships, or whatever, neither Germany nor Japan had the industrial capacity to replace the lost ones fast enough.

I think the Bismark was superior in design to even the Yamato. The steel was excellent quality, when John Cameron's movie crew survey'd the Bismark in 2000 they found that the inner armored hull survived the "coup de grace" torpedo spread from HMS Dorchester. She had superior weapons optics, superior gunnery.....

But a lousy butt. Her poor stern design killed her in the end.

Most Naval experts compairing a gun duel between the USS Iowa and the Yamato say the Iowa would have beaten Yamato to a pulp because of her high speed, faster turning gun turrets and lethal shell energy. But no doubt those 18 inch shells would have caused some serious damage with a few lucky hits.