Could Yamato even win against ONE Iowa?
For Yamato she got her massive 18inch gun as one of her advantage, while not exactly an advantage in terms of armor penetration (as the US 16inch with their super heavy shells are no slouch in that department) her 18inch shell do pack a wallop so it potentially can cause substantially more destruction once the shell hit and burst inside the target.
(those 18inch shells are no joke)
And Yamato’s armor layout is overall… somewhat heavier for the parts they concentrate on albeit at the cost of having a large chunk of her mass unprotected (though that doesn’t mean Iowa’s armor was a slouch either, but Iowa probably would not fare too well in short range slap fight with Yamato and would prefer to keep her range.
Yamato:
Iowa:
On Iowa’s favor is her superior fire control, radar, and perhaps most importantly… speed.
USN fire control system is hands down superior to what IJN had, we see this plays out very clearly during Battle off Samar.
And Iowa is most definitely faster than Yamato by quite a bit.
So in a theoretical match between 1 Yamato and 1 Iowa (which is never gonna happen but let’s pretend for a moment)…
Iowa will likely score hits first with the better fire control system and radar…
And once she start scoring hits, Yamato’s capability to effectively return fire will rapidly degrade.
That alone though probably wouldn’t guarantee outcome for Iowa, once Yamato gets closer… she’ll be able to hit back at Iowa more reliably… and that can spell trouble for Iowa.
But the problem for Yamato, is that Iowa is faster to begin with…
Assuming the captain knows what he’s doing, Iowa can choose the engagement range and maintain it, or at least keep it long enough for the duration of what can be expected as a practical combat.
And Yamato doesn’t have too many options to deal with that…
Unless if she got lucky and one of her 18inch shell can cripple Iowa to prevent her from just opening the range or disengaging… there’s not much she can do to stop Iowa if the Iowa just choose to… well… leave, or stay at a distance they prefer.
About the only situation I can think of that can tilt the outcome squarely in Yamato’s favor would be a sudden ambush at relatively short range, an ambush is overall an advantage for the attacker but if she can get close enough to Iowa before the engagement starts, Iowa might not be able to open the range before taking too much damage herself to continue fighting.
But how exactly to set such encounter is… well… that’s another problem, both ships have radar and Iowa’s radar is pretty good (for it’s time anyway)…
So how can we sneak a battleship the size of Yamato close enough to Iowa without her noticing it would be… uhhh… difficult, to put it mildly.
Writer: Iono Sama
