Re: Pocket Battleships in action
Thanks, Chris and David. I had begun to think that the triple turret had all three guns in the same cradle and that an English translation of a magazine article by Breyer saying that they were operationally independent applied to the firing of the guns rather than the setting or ranging of the individual guns. However, I have located a photograph of a "Scharnhorst-class battleship" showing Bruno turret with the three guns at different angles to earch other, so that idea of a single cradle did not apply. The right-hand and centre guns shared a loading mechanism but the left hand gun had an independent loader. The centre gun fired one second before the other two if all three were fired together, to avoid interference between the shells in flight. Sliding breech blocks meant that German big guns could fire more rapidly than British guns of similar size (3.5 rounds per minute vs 2 rpm) but although the German optics and radar were good for range, they were not better than others for direction, so it seems to me that the reason that Graf Spee and Lutzow both continued to shorten the rage during a head on approach in battle with warships was more to do with collecting gunnery data before they reversed course than a failure to appreciate their tactical situation.
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