(April 15, 2022 at 12:45 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: It's actually pretty rare for a big ship to go down quick, missile or not (or go down at all). Some ships have taken so much damage they been reported sunk multiple times in a single battle by the enemy. The ability to tow or salvage a hull shouldn't be taken as an indication that it hadn't suffered extensive damage. In other news, the russians claim to have retaliated against a factory that made anti ship missiles, and made a big deal about it. Obviously just coincidental.
I do like the squall thing, though. It'd have to be a squall, wouldn't it, since nobody else noticed the deluge what sunk the persian fleet that night.
A better comparison might be our own recent naval mishaps. We've had ships get hit by missiles and even collide, too. Didn't lose the boats. I don't recall there being much pushback to the notion that incompetence was the ultimate cause in each case - but I guess that only applies to us forces.
TLDR, the russian navy's problems aren't new or novel. They pumped their subs and ignored their surface fleet. Did the ukrainians hit that ship? It's highly likely. Would it have gone down, even so, if it were any other comparable ship in any other (allegedly) comparable force? Highly unlikely.
Golden BBs do sometimes happen, as @abaris alluded to when he mentioned Hood, but that wasn't the case here, as they had time to rig a tow -- implying at least one damage-control party being aboard. If Ukrainian claims of hitting it with two Neptunes are true, the ship took two 330-lb warheads aboard -- and it's only armored against splinters/fragments, so I don't know how likely or unlikely its later survival may have been.
Regarding the weather, my understanding is that the last few days have been stormy in the area. A magazine explosion almost certainly would have holed the hull and made it vulnerable to the weather.