Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Not sure if all of you heard this, but I just transferred back up to St. Paul to work in another office. Rochester was nice, but I'm glad to be back up by the fiance' and family.

Congrats pal.

Yup. Autonomous vehicles are going to put a lot of people out of work.

The HMS Hood did a lot to make the Bismark famous, really.  The odd thing is that the shot that blew up the Hood MAY have originated with the Prince Eugen that was with the Bismark.

The Hood was a large battle cruiser that lacked armor in key spots.  I was musing that the USS Constitution was a kind of battle cruiser of its day, fast enough to run from a real "ship of the line" and armed well enough to dominate other frigates.  

The German ship Tirpitz is less famous but had a larger impact on the course of the war just by "being".

The HMS Hood did a lot to make the Bismark famous, really.  The odd thing is that the shot that blew up the Hood MAY have originated with the Prince Eugen that was with the Bismark.

The Hood was a large battle cruiser that lacked armor in key spots.  I was musing that the USS Constitution was a kind of battle cruiser of its day, fast enough to run from a real "ship of the line" and armed well enough to dominate other frigates.  

The German ship Tirpitz is less famous but had a larger impact on the course of the war just by "being".

The British had a lot of emotion invested in the Hood.  She was built before the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, which--among other provisions--limited the size (weight, actually, but it's somewhat the same thing) of capital ships.  The battleships built after than were known as "treaty ships," and they were less than satisfactory.  They had to give up something--armor, armament, or propulsion--to stay within the treaty limits.  You got battleships like Nelson and Rodney, where there were no main guns aft of the superstructure, which was located about 2/3 of the way back to the stern.  They were jokingly referred to as Nelsol and Rodnol, as they sort of resembled a class of fleet oilers.
Back to Hood, Johnny Horton didn't invent calling her "The Mighty Hood."  That was how the British saw her--she was the largest battle cruiser ever built, the Pride of the Fleet.  As you mentioned, it was believed that she was fast enough to escape from any ship she couldn't outgun.  Analysis of Jutland cast doubt on that belief, as Beatty's battle cruisers did not fare well in that fight, and Hood's armor was upgraded between the wars.  She was scheduled for a major rebuild in 1941 to correct several shortcomings when WWII broke out.  She never got the upgrade.
Nice comparison to the USS Constitution and her fellow big frigates.
The Germans had had a different philosophy in building battle cruisers before WWI.  Instead of reducing armor protection, they reduced the size of the main guns.  These fared better at Jutland than the British ones.  They were badly shot up, but none of them blew up like three of Beatty's did.
WWI did a lot to kill enthusiasm for battle cruisers, and several of them--some already built, others still under construction--were converted to aircraft carriers.  Lexington and Saratoga were the American examples of this.
Nazi Germany built the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau before WWII.  They were sometimes called fast battleships, but they were really battle cruisers.

Speaking of Singapore, there is of course the old story that the guns of the fortress could not be turned around to fire on the Japanese who invaded by land instead of sea.  Reality is that guns were equipped with only armor piercing shells, not high explosive, so they'd be of little value against an armed force on land.  Naval guns would fire either armor piercing rounds, which were mostly steel, or high explosive, which were mostly, well, explosive.  Tanks today use the same basic concept firing either sabot rounds of HEAT rounds, in the main.

An M1A2 fires a sabot round of repleted uranium which carries a lot of momentum to whatever it hits.  The Russian tanks were often equipped with reactive armor that would explode outward when hit, but the sabot would go right through, and generate  a lot of heat if it did not penetrate.

The USS Washington fired somewhere around 78 rounds in a night battle with the Japanese battle cruiser Kirishima near Guadalacanal and had estimated 9 hits, at 10,000 yards or so, radar guided, in 1942.  The IJN Kirishima was sunk.  Not an equal contest, and one of few battleship engagements in WW Two.

Most battleships never did what they were designed to do, fight other BBs.

CD:

Bismarck and Tirpitz may have had exaggerated reputations.  In some ways, they reflected WWI-era thinking.  For example, they had two different types of medium guns--12 150mm (5.9") guns for use against ships and 16 105mm (4.1") guns for anti-aircraft fire.  By comparison, the American Iowa-class battleships had 20 dual-purpose 5" guns.  This left more room on the Iowas for smaller 40mm and 20mm AA guns.

Also, the Bismarcks were designed for a different role for what they were intended to perform.  From the start, they were intended as commerce-raiders, and that's how they were used.  But they were designed to slug it out with other battleships, and did not have the range that commerce-raiders needed.

Here's an amateur analysis that concludes that the Iowa-class battleships were the best ever, significantly better than the much-bigger and more heavily armed Japanese Yamato-class ships.  The Bismarcks don't come out very well here either.

http://www.combinedfleet.com/baddest.htm