Your Country Sucks, Get over it.

I am sure some (most) of ya'll remember the animated series called Starblazers. I watched a few episodes of it. I was not impressed. I saw it for what it was and decided that I did not need to waste my time watching it. The premise of the show is that Earth has been partially destroyed by a race of aliens that decided that the only way to be sure was to nuke us from orbit. So while we are all living deep underground, it is up to the Japanese to take the battleship Yamato sunk by the USA in 1945 and refit it as a spaceship to fly to a neighboring galaxy to get a bucket of cleanser that will clean up all the radiation. Sort of an ingalactic quest for Pine-Sol.

Here is what it is really about. Their country sucks. They got their arses handed to them by us in WW2 and now they can't have a military to speak of. So they come up with lame stuff like this in an attempt to somehow imagine how their country would be if they could of won the war.

You see this in a lot of post war Japanese culture. Another example would be Godzilla. Remember the powerful military they always seemed to have to bring to bear against that giant lizard that was of course created as a by product of the atomic bombs that were dropped in late summer of 1945? So they blame us for the monster and then use their "powerful" military to stop the threat "we" created. They are just refighting WW2. You lost! You lost! Get the heck over it already. (The preceding statement is not to be applied to anything that might of happened in this country between the years 1861 and 1865.)

The image above is of a diorama that shows how the Yamato looks today. When the US Navy sinks a battleship they do it in such a way that even if the ocean drys up, there ain't no rebuilding. Contrast this with Pearl Harbor. Eight US battleships were sunk or damaged and 6 of them were later able to get back in the fight. Only the USS Oklahoma and USS Arizona did not return to service. If you are gonna win a war you have to know how to sink a ship so that is stays sunk.

These surveys show that Yamato ended up in two major halves at a depth of 1,400 feet. The surprising thing is that it turned out that she had first turned over to port, and while turning, `vomited' out the huge 18.1 inch gun turrets and their barbettes in their entirety. Immediately after, came the huge explosion seen, but it was not "C" turret at all, but rather apparently "B" turret magazine that first exploded. Though this contradicted all prior assumptions, ironically, this matched the testimony of Yamato' s XO Nomura who had all along reported seeing a red light flash for No.1 magazine just before the capsize.

Even so, it seems that it was No.2, not No.1 that went first. In any event, the explosion of forward main magazines was sufficient to sever meters of the bow section clean off the ship. Further, immediately following, apparently the aft 6-inch magazine exploded and tore a large hole in the bottom on the port side of the ship, about level with the mainmast. Both halves subsequently plunged to the bottom, the bow landing upright, and the bulk of the ship landing flat upside down, the bridge superstructure crushed to the side. The rear half is the longest, some 180 meters, and is keel up. The bow half is 90 meters long, with the break just abaft No.1 barbette. The bow half lies upright less than 50 meters to `starboard' of the aft section, pointed at an angle to its midships. (source: http://www.combinedfleet.com/atully08.htm)

Sorry kids, but there ain't no rebuilding of Yamato. Now Spacebattleship Texas. . . you might have something there.