Forgot to mention: In this timeline the Cold War would be much more favorable to the American side, as the USSR would have a much harder time turning China Red. The early forced decolonization may give the communists an edge in Africa and Southeast Asia though. That would depend on how nice the Western Allies are to the citizens of those regions after kicking the Japanese out.
Large scale Yamato Model
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looks better than my 1/700 Tamyia model I built when I was 14.
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Perhaps it was a movie prop, because its like a shrine and who and why would such a thing be made. Japan lost or did they?
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The man hours to build that must have been incredible!
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The model lives in the Yamato Museum in Kure:
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The man hours to build that must have been incredible!
A statement equally applicable to the scale model and to the full-sized original!
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I have this 2005 movie on Bluray… the trailer is in Japanese but the movie is either dubbed or subtitled (I can’t recall)… in either case I enjoyed the movie and thought it was good.
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I’d like to state for the record battleships of dreadnaught and higher tonnage were kind of worthless.
Just think of all the extra resources and manpower the Germans would have had if they never put so much into the High Seas Fleet. I get the “Fleet in Being” stuff, but really, once one power has an edge they can keep ahead of you on, then why bother chasing them on that front.
Also, you read all the gunnery reports from WWI and WWII, hitting enemy ships with massive caliber gunnery was speculative at best. Sure you get a couple lucky shots like against the Hood etc, but mostly firing huge shells long range against moving targets was very inaccurate.
Yes radar fire control fixed some of that, but by then battleships were obsolete anyway. WWII naval combat was dominated by the sub, the destroy, the carrier and the plane.
Finally, there were only like 4-5 major naval battles in all of history that involved large metal ships duking it out with caliber guns. (Tushima, Jutland, Falklands (WWI), maybe 2nd Naval Battle Guadalcanal, maybe Manila Bay)
Big metal ships with guns just weren’t that great. Maybe necessary for a spell, but mostly better to look at than to regard as an effective instrument of national policy.
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I’d like to state for the record battleships of dreadnaught and higher tonnage were kind of worthless.
The rise and fall of the battleship concept, i.e. the concept of a large, oceangoing, engine-propelled warship armed with heavy guns and protected by heavy armour, reflects the fact that the concept arose at a time (the mid-to-late 19th century) when it was genuinely the most powerful type of naval combat vessel, but that this context subsequently changed. The context at the time was that conventional surface combat was the only act in town; the alternatives (which I’ll get to in a moment) either didn’t exist yet or were still at an embyonic stage and thus could largely be ignored. Technological progress (such as the invention of the steam turbine engine) allowed battleship evolution to proceed at a rapid pace, and it continued right up to the rather sudden end of the battleship era, but that same progress gradually brought some competitors to the scene, and those competitors ultimately displaced the battleship; in a nutshell, it was an example of the “evolution until revolution” phenomenon that has affected other technologies (e.g. portable computer storage, with floppy disks gradually become smaller – from 8" to 5.25" to 3.25" – until being displaced altogether by optical discs, which were in turn displaced by USB keys). In the world of naval warfare, the alternatives that emerged to traditional surface combat with guns were underwater and aerial combat: torpedoes initially launched from rapid-attack surface craft (which eventually evolved into the destroyer) and later launched from submarines ultimately also launched from aircraft, the latter of which could also launch two new types of weapon, the aerial bomb and the guided missile (the Italian battleship Roma was sunk by a guided bomb, which was roughly halfway between these two weapon types).
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I bought a toy model of the Iowa from a garage sale as a teen. She was launched in our lake. We then commenced to attack her with bb guns until she slipped beneath the waves.
It was great fun. We could never locate the wreck.
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@ABWorsham:
I bought a toy model of the Iowa from a garage sale as a teen. She was launched in our lake. We then commenced to attack her with bb guns until she slipped beneath the waves.
It was great fun. We could never locate the wreck.
This may interest you. The ships can be recovered by means of a floating marker (attached to a reel of rope) which breaks away from the ship and rises to the surface after the vessel sinks.
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