the hood

recently i had a discusion with a guy stating that the hms hood was a fast battleship not a battle cruiser,
what do you think about this?

 

This has been done to death on other boards and there appears to be no consensus over what a "battlecruiser" actually is.

Given Hood had similar if not slightly better armour than the QE class, as well as the same armament, that could class her as a battleship (the true BCs of the Invincible to Renown classes had less armour and fewer guns than the comparable BBs). Then again, her speed would class her as a BC at the time she was built.

It will be interesting to see what take Tiornu and some of the other experts have on this one.

 

There never has been agreement on exactly what a battlecruiser is. You can look at it historically and say that the battlecruiser is an all-big-gun armored cruiser. Or you can look at the ships of World War I and say that a battlecruiser is a capital ship that's larger and faster than a battleship but with less armor and weaponry. Or you can...find lots of other definitions, all of which are equally valid, but only within a very small, specific context.
Hood is certainly a battlecruiser. She was officially rated as a "battle cruiser," so there's no point in denying it. Was she also a fast battleship? Sure, why not, she had weaponry and armor protection equal to that of a battleship, so go ahead and call her one.
The definitions varied over time and from one navy to the next. Probably the only mistake is to be too dogmatic on the issue.

 

Hood's deck was only 3 inches thick in armour, and Bismarck easily penetrated that, and saying that a battlecruiser has less armour and more speed than a battleship, I might go for Hood as a battlecruiser.

 

The 3in protective deck was more than you'd find in any RN battleship in 1920. As I said, the issue was not a BB-BC one, but one of modernization.
Bismarck's shell did not hit the 3in section. Most probably it hit the slope protection.

 

correct me if i'm wrong but the armor of the hood was only 27 % of total displacement

 

Every navy had its own system for determining weight percentages. This makes it very difficult to make international comparisons. The brawny USS South Dakota was officially about 22% armor.

 

SD was also a bit on the small side for an American BB, IIRC.

 

Yeah, a 38,000-ton midget.

 

But I say South Dakota would have kicked butt at Savo Island if not for mechanical problems. I hear she put a shell into Jean Bart's magazines once from somebody's post.

 

Massachusetts was the ship that fired on Jean Bart. She was a sistership of SoDak.

 

Right. But still, it's the same class.

 

I can really imagine the crew of HMS Prince of Wales saying "Its all right, there are 4 others in the class still afloat" :lol:

 

Hee! But I think his point was that sisterships would show similar capabilities.
What that has to do with the topic, I can't say.

 

Someone said SoDak was a midget. I wanted to point out that even if it is relatively lightweight compared to some of the big guns (Iowa, KGV maybe, Yamato for sure) that SoDak and her sisters could do some real damage. Jean Bart outweighed Massachusetts, yet Massachusetts put the shell into the heavier ship's magazines.

 

The midget reference was a joke. SoDak was designed to the same 35,000-ton limit as KGV and Richelieu.

 

Even so, the SOUTH DAKOTA-class ships were rather cramped as their crews expanded during the war, IIRC. The same was true for the NORTH CAROLINA-class.

 

If i didn't know better i would say the Hood was a SoDak BB.

We all know that the Hood had a thin deck armour and was doomed on a battle at long range. The facts that the PoW was brand new and that they first fired at the Prinz Eugen didn't help eather.
But what at close range? How big would her changes be? I mean, at long range the Bismarck was damaged, not big but still damaged enough to return to port. What if the Hood started firing at a closer range and imediatly aimed for the Bismarck?

 

British battle doctrine preferred ranges of 12-16,000 yards, and part of that was due to the lack of modernized deck protection in the old battleships. You may recall that Holland had charged in with Hood until they came to a range right near 16,000 yards, and then began a turn. So close....
Hood's vertical protection could be pierced at that range, but so could pretty much any ship's. The difference is that belt penetrations are less likely to cause catastrophic explosions.
Hood's initial salvoes on PE were close enough to drop splinters onto the cruiser. If she'd been firing on Bismarck all along, she might have done some good.

 

If KGV was Admiral Tovey's flagship and Anson, Howe & Duke of York had not been completed at the time why didn't Tovey go in himself or send some other battleship? Or were Hood & POW the nearest?