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.
for the umteenth time 
