Sinks your flagship in three minutes

>combined laughing in burger and gamma radiation

The Battle in the Denmark Strait is weird.
2 vs 2 engagement, Germans have two new (but functioning) ships, British have one older battlecruiser and a battleship with workers still aboard.
Yet it wasn't a total German victory. Hood was blown up abut Prince of Wales managed to damaged Bismarck and then fled. Admiral Lütjens exercised a little too much caution by forbidding the German ships to open fire as soon as enemies were spotted and even after his own ships came under fire. It potentially allowed the range to decrease as Admiral Holland rushed towards the Germans to try to prevent the threat of plunging fire.

This excuse is literally made every time lol. The Hood started as a lightly armored battlecruiser, but was up-armored between the wars. The version of the Hood that met the Bismarck in battle was bigger and heavier than the Bismarck and had thicker armor. It was the biggest, heaviest and most powerful ship the Royal Navy had and it was a battleship in all but name.

And the “it was new and the crew was unexperienced” defense for the Prince Of Wales makes no sense, because the Bismarck was almost as new (commissioned 4 months before the Prince Of Wales) and its crew was probably even less experienced. It was the Bismarck’s very first mission, its first time in the Atlantic and its very first battle too. Considering the history of the “Kriegsmarine” and of the Royal Navy, it is a pretty safe bet that there probably were more experienced officers and sailors, who had served on other ships before, on board of the Prince Of Wales than there were on the Bismarck.

Hood was still a battlecruiser. She did have a refit done that included up-armoring her forward half and she was due to have another done for her aft before the war broke out. The shot that killed her was a lucky one and there's no escaping that. A well-aimed shot from Bismarck's gun crews, after straddling the target and making corrections, that ended up piercing a magazine.
Prince of Wales had issues with her main guns, they were not fully working. It was a mechanical issue and not a crew issue. No nation sent its crews out without training them, no matter what was going on in the war.
I
t's not looking for excuses to say "well if things happened this way, then.." it's looking at the facts of what happened. Both commanders, Lütjens and Holland, had their thought patterns which made sense in their minds, but that created the ultimate outcome when their differing ideas were added together during the battle.

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>Hood had better and more guns

look at this brainlet.

Hood had massively out of date fire and control systems. It was only not retired because the British needed to retain their dominance at sea. By all respects it was horrendously obsolete in anything except naval fire support roles.

It was only sent to chase the Bismark because the British had shit for anything better to chase after it at the time. They were desperate and felt if the Bismark made it to open waters it could cause massive damage to shipping lanes.

Yeah sorry. I always have the 17 inch guns in mind when thinking of the Hood.
So the Bismarck wasn't inferior except for the number of guns on one turret? I sometimes don't get it really. On one side the KM is seen as a joke by Brits but now it was dangerous even when the Bismarck wasn't even made for commerce raiding?

Humans have a really bad tendency to name things "un-x-able" which then proceed to do "x"

>Titanic
>Hindenburg
>Kursk

>Hindenburg
But it's the name of the Zeppelin creator?

The Kreisgsmarine was a joke. It wasted massive amounts of resources and inflicted almost no damage upon its adversaries (U-boats notwithstanding).

That doesn't mean the Hood wasn't completely outclassed. The Brits had a ton of ships to put the Bismark to shame, but they weren't present. The Hood was, and through a series of unfortunate events it got turned into scrap. Even without a lucky shot, it was still heavily outmatched and likely would have been mauled, if not sunk, soon after.

Which ships were those? I fully recognize the inferiority of the Kriesgmarine's surface fleet compared to the Royal Navy or eventually to the US Atlantic Fleet.
The Kriegsmarine had too few capital ships to do direct battle. They did have some newer balanced designs though, whereas the British ships were mostly older and focused in areas: Nelson & Rodney were a way to cram nine 16in guns into a Washington Naval Treaty compliant design, but they were slower and used a lot of fuel. The King George V class was built around a newer armor layout and decent mobility, but the 14in guns would lack punch at far range compared to some other battleships. Other battleships were older designs and thus not as fast.

Ships like Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Bismarck, and Tirpitz had a pretty good balance of having armor, firepower, and speed. While taking those first two against battleships & battlecruisers would have been a bad idea (they only had 11in guns) those German ships could easily take on any cruiser, or even multiple. The idea of commerce raiding was to use that advantage of speed and small force to pick and choose what battles to engage in and which ones to run from.

This is why the US stuck with naming their ships after cities and states for the longest time.

The entire King George V class of battleships were better. It's just that the one present at the battle, Prince Wales, was defective.

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The only area the King George V was "inferior" was in main gun caliber. 14in for a battleship of the 1940's was going small. At shorter ranges it didn't matter and it would punch through belt armor, at far ranges it may not be as effective...kind of a moot point since it would still be a large projectile coming slamming down on an enemy.
The problems with the turrets came from some early teething issues as well as crew training. Both were improved eventually.

=kek

What is it with Anglous and them there shit like the "Hms Unblowupable"?

I'm sorry, my brain went retarded. I mean what is with the anglou and naming there ship, "Hms Unblowupable"?

Hood wasn't completely useless, she could have sent anything Cruiser weight and below straight to the bottom. And at the start of the war she still outgunned anything at sea that wasnt french or german,

Granted, it WAS mistake to send her out after Bismark, but Holland's hands were tied. Judging by his shitty navigation skills, he would have lost the germans if he waited for KGV.

>flagship

This depserate to skew the battle. Hood was outdated junk that was releated to PR duties.

Besides, it wasn't a shell from bismark that damaged hood to the point where she had to be scuttled.

Their turrets were prone to malfunction during fire as well.

>name ship HMS Invincible
>you can still see it

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Technically both Hood and Bismarck were flagships since they carried admirals leading their formations.

What did he mean by this?