Ron Saueracker
Posts: 12098
Joined: 1/28/2002 From: Ottawa, Canada OR Zakynthos Island, Greece Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: dereck I know this has been brought up in another thread but I can't find it and I'm too lazy and pressed for time to check. In the other thread people have wondered if it was luck, tactics, etc that lead to the US victory at Midway but after watching a show on the History Channel there was something brought up which marked the big differences between the US and Japanese navies and could definitely have been a contribution to the loss of the 4 Japanese carriers. Two words: fire fighting. As a navy vet I can attest that in the US Navy now (as with during WWII shortly after Pearl Harbor on) fire fighting was drilled into sailors from boot camp on. Unfortunately the Japanese navy didn't train in fire fighting because they thought it fostered a "defeatist attitude" so when the fires started on the Japanese carriers (which even a 1st rate fire fighting crew wouldn't have been able to defeat) all the Japanese had were, at best, 2nd or 3rd rate fire fighters. I know this isn't the MAJOR factor in the US victory but it does show a big difference in the cultures of the two navies. I'm not sure of this -- so correct me if I'm wrong -- but I don't think more than maybe 1 of all the US carriers lost in WWII were as a direct result of fire. Most of the carriers lost had been abandoned and sunk by destroyer torpedoes or by Japanese submarines after being abandoned before the US could scuttle them. It appears that the US Navy could handle battle damage better than the Japanese navy could. And this is where the WITP damage model is a bit off in my eyes. Fire, not flooding was the major issue. The burned out hulks that were once KB had to be scuttled by torps. Sure, there was the odd case of progressive flooding (Kongo), but fire should be where Japan stinks in damage control, not flooding to the degree we see in the game.
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Yammas from The Apo-Tiki Lounge. Future site of WITP AE benders! And then the s--t hit the fan
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