Was Japan even trying???

I was bored so I started watching this "documentary" on YouTube about naval battles in the pacific, and right now in this video, multiple Japanese heavy cruisers and battleships are getting rekted by American patrol boats. It's like they're not even trying to win. They just keep missing over and over again whereas the American ships always hit every time. How is this possible? It seems extremely unrealistic in my opinion.

youtube.com/watch?v=qIhnh0EEl1E

sageru

omae no uso wa yamete

Squinty eyes are worse for aiming

I read somewhere that American ships had state of the art radar based fire control systems and could shoot far more accurately than the nips ever could.

I have an interesting/probably shit answer to this.

There's a Japanese writer named Tanizaki who wrote this piece called, "In Praise of Shadows." In it, he talks about, amongst other things, how Eastern people have had to adapt to many Western inventions. Tanizaki thinks that if Orientals had created these inventions themselves then they would have created them in such a way that would be more fitting to Oriental people. So perhaps it is the case that Japanese people were not as accustomed to the type of battle ship they used as Europeans were.

Obviously this is not a sufficient answer to this question. I'd say what said is more likely the leading cause.

It makes the war look incredibly one-sided. I mean, you have a bunch of battleships and cruisers all trying to shoot at an American destroyer, and the destroyer just dodges everything and makes a successful torpedo run. Then it finally takes a hit from one of the Yamato's secondary guns, at which put it loses all mobility but keeps fighting just by shooting its tiny 5-in guns as fast as it can. And even though the 5-in guns are too weak to penetrate any armor, they still do a good amount of damage just because the crew is able to precisely target unarmored areas of the Japanese shits, whereas the Japanese ships just keep missing, over and over again. The destroyer doesn't even sink until much later. Despite being crippled, it manages to limp away to safety and the crew successfully abandons the ship before it goes down.

Technological inferiority. They lacked proper radar fire control (or even basic radar) and relied completely on spotter planes and lookouts to even see the enemy, lack of fire control systems means everything is manually sighted and targeted so misses were more common, if anything they did better than one would expect with such a disadvantage

Samuel B. Roberts > entire Japanese navy

>They lacked proper radar fire control (or even basic radar)
Japanese radar are for locating the enemy and range finding.
They had the best optical fire control systems of the war, which was the primary form of fire controls for ships at the time. Over the horizon is a fucking meme and not used until after the war.

Most of the guns on a battleship are designed to take out large ships like cruisers or other battleships. Using those guns against a small patrol boat would actually be quite difficult because you'd have to be very precise, and because the target is so small you will miss completely if your aim is off even a little bit.

>what are secondary guns

American battleships have many secondary guns as well as lots of even smaller guns that were used specifically against aircraft. Japanese ships didn't give those features the same degree of importance. They were an after-thought.

>American battleships have many secondary guns as well as lots of even smaller guns that were used specifically against aircraft. Japanese ships didn't give those features the same degree of importance. They were an after-thought.
Japanese ships had more numerous and powerful secondary guns than their American counterpart until Americans decided to stick a bunch of 5" DP guns for battleships to become floating AA escort for carriers.

neat doc

Japenese naval tech was pretty good in the period before war broke out in 1941. They were good friends with the Brits before WW1 and picked up the doctrines of good naval architecture from them (minus the idiotic obsession with battlecruisers).

The difference between Japan and the Allies was that once the war started, it was a period of rarely-rivalled technological development on the Allied side, but of virtual stagnation on the Japanese side. The Japanese did not move on in radar or atomics. They dabbled with chemicals and biologicals but were never able to deploy successfully against the US.

What did for the Japs was an imbalance - too much into big ships, not enough into antisubmarine warfare, logistics and fleet train. They expected to deal a knockout blow, and having failed to do so, failed to adapt.

I would be interested to see any links on the relative degree of development of Japan as a "war economy" compared to that of the other parties to WW2. The Germans didn't make a real transformation until they were already being encircled at Stalingrad.

>There's a Japanese writer named Tanizaki who wrote this piece called, "In Praise of Shadows." In it, he talks about, amongst other things, how Eastern people have had to adapt to many Western inventions. Tanizaki thinks that if Orientals had created these inventions themselves then they would have created them in such a way that would be more fitting to Oriental people. So perhaps it is the case that Japanese people were not as accustomed to the type of battle ship they used as Europeans were.
lmao what the fuck would oriental radar look like? A heap of competent designers and technicians create something solid, then an officer comes in that thinks he knows what he's doing and the whole project ends up a fucking abortion tier mess because they are too polite to tell him to fuck off?

Wasn't the Yagi antenna from Japan?

Yes, in the 20s. They were well up in antenna design - the Brits were still using phased arrays of dipoles for the ChainHome radar and took a long time to get into UHF/SHF radar. The US was nowhere in radar for a long time.

Yeah the Americans barely had the CXAM
radar. Well at least it showed there were people in America that understood it if nothing else.
Then the Tizard Mission came which helped even further.

I was just memeing based on some of their small arms projects, imagine being one of those poor cunts having your neat tidy firearm turned into something an Ork from Warhammer would build.

One of the things which crippled the Japs was interservice rivalry and failure to pool knowledge. The IJN ploughed on with radar without working with the other services and squandered a lot of their good work as a result.

The Japanese Army were forever capturing Allied gear and not realising what it was until it got back to Tokyo and someone dismantled it and said, "yep, the Navy has had this for about 3 years".

>What did for the Japs was an imbalance - too much into big ships, not enough into antisubmarine warfare, logistics and fleet train. They expected to deal a knockout blow, and having failed to do so, failed to adapt.
With their economy, the only chance they had was to deal a knock out blow in a decisive battle, which the Americans did everything to avoid.
Their strict adherence to Mahanian doctrine didn't really help either. Mahan's doctrine was that one wages battles to control trade and sealanes. However, what happens is the opposite; naval confrontations are a last resort. Warships are too expensive to lose and naval confrontations only occurred when one's trade was being threatened.

Kek.

>Mahan's doctrine was that one wages battles to control trade and sealanes


Not him, but while Mahan's doctrine was in theory to do that, in practice, it was very badly suited to do so; a fleet based around huge, expensive capital ships that are capable of taking on their opposite numbers in a pitched battle tend to be too few and too expensive to actually control sea lanes, which means that the commerce raiding threat that underlies naval battle and forces it to happen is mostly carried out by smaller, weaker ships, not the capital ships.

Light cruisers were never restricted under the Washington Treaty except that they needed to be under 15,000 tons at standard displacement and have guns of 6-in or less. It would have made most sense to make very large numbers of those ships to maximize sea control abilities.

>Light cruisers were never restricted under the Washington Treaty except that they needed to be under 15,000 tons at standard displacement and have guns of 6-in or less
>15,000 tons
I think I'm being ripped off in Rule the Waves

I was wrong. It was 10000 tons. Also, is RTW good?

They were led by Admiral Zhukov-sama.

Well, every meme applied to Zhokov applies to the Imperial Japanese Army/Navy to a much higher degree. No military has ever been so cruel to their own soldiers as Japan during those years.

I enjoy it, approachable autism
early battleships age like milk so I tend to go a bit Jeune École with sturdy, futureproofed armoured cruisers as my largest ships which means I ride by the seat of my pants for the first five years or so

I think there's a torrent on rutracker if you don't want to cough up the absurd computer wargames price for the game

The Army was bad, but the IJN was *relatively* egalitarian by Japanese standards.

How far does it go? Do you get to make aircraft carriers? Guided missile ships? Or does it end at WW2?

Did anyone really answer his question?

It's a computer animation. This isn't what actually happened. The history channel, no less.

The vast majority of shots from any unguided weapon are expected to miss anyway.

cuts off at 1925 unfortunately, with no aircraft represented

Radar aided gunnery didn't actually confer much of an advantage.

Meh, that covers pretty much the entire length of history that battleships were actually the heart of naval warfare. Every battleship started after 1925 should have been an aircraft carrier instead.

Now that's a bunch of bullshit when you look at the Naval Battles of Guadalcanal or the Battle of Surigao Strait where it did show that Radar-guided FCS gave a huge advantage.

It did jack shit in most encounters.

>Radar aided gunnery didn't actually confer much of an advantage.

If the documentary is any indication, Japanese ships tended to miss more often than no whereas American ships tended to hit more often than not. Over the course of a war, that starts to add up to something very significant. But the biggest advantage of radar gunnery was the advantage it give for dual-purpose guns. American battleships had much, much more effective AAA than their Japanese counterparts.

That's not an argument. I literally gave you examples of big battles where it proved to have an advantage. Washington hit Kirishima 20 times with her 16-inch guns in the dark of night thanks to radar. West Virginia hit Yamashiro with her first Salvo at night at 22,800 yards and proceeded to hit directly on top of her 5 times in a row.

Please, show me examples where radar FCS didn't do jack shit.

Yeah, I suppose. You can build some pretty satisfying battleships towards the end too.

To add to my review, ship design is fun and approachable, the battle mechanics are solid, very fluid almost real-time turn based combat.

in the latest game mode there's a random tech option where the effectiveness of different technologies is changed, gives you a bit more of an experimental feel, puts you more in the mind of Fisher, what if more of his experiments paid off?

*In the latest update there is a random tech game mode...

I did kind of want to make ridiculous H41 super dreadnoughts with 18 inch guns though.

You can research 18" guns in the timeline, ships start to get broken after more than 50,000 tons though apparently

50,000 tons is pretty big. That covers every WW2 battleship except for Yamato which had a standard displacement over 70,000 tons.

>I think there's a torrent on rutracker if you don't want to cough up the absurd computer wargames price for the game
link if possible?

H-41 is basically a wet dream paper design.
H-39 and H-40 could be built.

I don't know about that, the Royal Navy was crazy inaccurate during WW1.

Oh wait I was thinking of H-43 and H-44. Those are the wet dream paper designs. Sorry never mind my previous post.

No they wernt,their shells were crap

Sounds like the Italian shells and the half the time defective American 6 inch shells(High dud rate).

You have it slightly wrong.

H39 was the initial design, weighing around 50000+ tons.
H41 was a revised design created after Bismark when under. It had a displacement around 60000+ tons.

H39 and H41 were both expensive, but plausible designs. With enough time, Germany could have built them.

Then Hitler when full retard and asked for more proposals for even larger battleships. This designs became known as H42, H43, and H44. All of these designs were impossible to build because Germany did not have any port large enough to actually build them.

And then there was H45, which is best not even spoken of.

I already corrected myself brah.

I didn't see your post until after my post was already posted.

They would have taken any country even the United States a long time to build.

First naval battle of Guadalcanal.

Just posting the name of a battle without any elaboration isn't an answer. I'm not the user you're replying to but do you really expect people to just go and look over the entire battle to try and figure out what you're implying?

Japs and American fight at night. American force has five ships with radar. Japs are loaded out with bombardment shells, as they're not there for a surface action.

The japs were also very, very well practiced at night gunnery.

The American force got absolutely mauled, with 11 of 13 ships either crippled and unable to resist or sunk.

The Japanese had 8 of 14 ships still capable of fighting.

Had dawn been a little further off, there's a real chance that Henderson field would have been shelled out of existence that night.

He's probably young enough to think that a "mic drop" reply will get him upvotes

You do realize that the first naval battle of Guadalcanal turned out the way it did not because of radar FCS, but because of the fact that it was a clusterfuck right?

The two forces ran right into each other after the Japanese fleet emerged from the storm and they were intermingled at close range. Most of the ships that were equipped with the new radar were in the very rear. And the fact that some of the ships had the new radar and most didn't had caused a lot of confusion in the battle because of contradicting reports where the Japanese ships were.

Good on the Japanese for being well practiced at night gunnery, but the FCS wasn't a reason why the USN sustained heavy casualties from the battle. The fact that they were surrounded and there was a lot of confusion to the point where US ships were firing at each other was more of a bigger factor than saying "FCS didn't do jack shit".

>But user, if fire-control systems don't magically resolve all situations, that means they were never useful!

>le condescending green text
Great argument

I never said that they could magically solve all situations, just that there was an advantage of having it. You gave an example of a battle where US forces lost because of other factors other than radar FCS(where most of their ships didn't even have it) and claim that a shining example why it wasn't useful.

That was also back in 1942. Radar guided FCS advanced exponentially as the war went on as seen during the Battle of Leyte Gulf during the Surigao Strait and Samar encounters(and also in the ships' deadly Anti-Aircraft capability).

Matapan was the first radar-guided naval victory, and it was utterly conclusive when it comes to the value of even relatively long-wavelength radar.

You do realize the majority of those ships don't have FCS.

My post was intended as satire to make fun of I am:

Ah alright, my mistake.

Mo

>lmao what the fuck would oriental radar look like?
Honorabu or cute or both

and what about the suicide cruises?