Knowledge

Was the Battleship Yamato really that big compared to other WW2 battleships?

It was absolutely huge.

The USS Texas that served in Both world wars was 532 feet long and 27,000 tons.

The USS South Dakota and North Carolina classes built pre-war to treaty limits were 35,000 tons. The USS Iowa class built at the beginning of the war and entering service late in the war after the lapse of the treaties was 45,000–52,000 ton empty, or 57,000 tons loaded and 880 feet long.

The Yamato class including the sister ship Musashi completed just after Pearl Harbor were 65,000 tons empty, 72,000 ton Behemoths when fully loaded.

The US had a 62,000 ton battleship design ready in 1942 that was never started. It was wisely delayed days after Midway and the purchase of more carriers expedited.

Here are same scale side by side comparisons of the (L-R) KMS Bismarck, USS Iowa, IJN Yamato classes. While the Iowas were longer the Yamatos were much more massive displacement.


Related Posts

If an astronaut working on the International Space Station were somehow cut loose from his tether, would he fall back to Earth or orbit around it?

If an astronaut outside the ISS has his or her tether broken, they do not fall to the Earth. Before the tether was broken, the astronaut was in orbit at…

Escape velocity is supposed to be 24,000 mph, but our rockets never achieve this speed. How does that work?

Imagine you are sitting on a skateboard at the bottom of your drive and you need to get to the top. You could push off your garage door…

Can humans live on the side of a tidally-locked planet where neither day nor night exist?

Humans with their technology developed on Earth could live on a tidally locked planet where neither day nor night exists. We used to think that such planets become…

How did NASA make the shuttle safer after Columbia?

The problem was not just the piece of foam that struck the wing, it was a failure of imagination — NASA had seen foam fall before and decided…

Why do US Air Force fighters like the F-22 and F-15 place the engines right next to each other while Russian fighters like Su-27 always have a gap between the engines?

The United States has this thing where we learn from our mistakes. One of those mistakes was spacing twin engines as far apart as we did in the…

Is Mars too small to have a permanent atmosphere?

No, it is not. It used to have a thick atmosphere, perhaps thicker than Earth’s. It had that atmosphere for a couple of billion years and had oceans….