Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!ukma!rutgers!att!cbnews!henry@zoo.toronto.edu
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Ship armor
Message-ID: <6096@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 1 May 89 03:01:32 GMT
References: <5929@cbnews.ATT.COM>
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From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
>In the battle of the Falkland Islands (the WWI one) British battlecruisers
>caught (I think) 3 German cruisers (they'd been caught away from home at the
>start of the war and were engaged on commerce raiding) and blew them out
>of the water before the Germans could fire back.
>
>[mod.note:  Never a fair fight, of course...

This one definitely wasn't.  Don't take the Battle of the Falklands as
indicative of what then-state-of-the-art warships would do against each other.
The German unit was their Far Eastern squadron, a handful of small, old
ships well below then-current first-line standards.  It had managed to
beat up on an even smaller and older British squadron at the Battle of
Coronel.  That caused enough of a fuss that the British Admiralty sent
two of their latest and best battle cruisers down to settle the issue.

It turned out to be a textbook example of the value of long-range guns
on fast ships against inferior opponents:  the British ships used their
superior speed to stand off at a range where the German guns couldn't
hit effectively but the British ones could, and pounded the German ships
into scrap at leisure.  Against more modern German ships -- faster, with
bigger guns and heavier armor -- it wouldn't have been so one-sided.
All the actual result proved was the obvious:  much heavier guns on much
faster ships are an unbeatable combination.

                                     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
                                 uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu