HMS Glorious; a review with little playtime in it

Machinery of War Discussion Navy
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Inspired by a certain potato masher.

Preface: This is mostly opinion with some facts, and I will update this. Maybe.

First off; the pros;

Fast, enough to keep pace with many cruisers.
A lot of secondaries.

Generally ignored by players that can actually kill it.

Biggest guns in the battle rating (38.1cms) that hit obnoxiously hard, with a fairly average reload speed also with a caveat

Ammunition deep in the water which is always a plus… With a huge downside.

5.7 like the Ikoma but actually a threat past 10km. Mostly.

Now, the absolutely glaring flaws of this abomination:
Made of paper. The armor is astronomically ass. Resists most low to mid caliber SAP but that’s about it. Oddly, people don’t seem to know this and just straight up ignore it. Which leads to the next point:

Poor turning ability which hampers evasive maneuvers. While not Amagi bad, Glorious definitely struggles. This requires the ship to be played in a way that’s counteractive to its guns.

Which are both horribly inaccurate (dispersion) and are less than I have digits on one hand for a whopping total of four guns. In two poorly armored turrets. Sure, you can get the occasional 18km+ cheeky snipe but it’s basically gambling if they actually go where you want them to land in the first place.

The secondary suite suffers from poor penetration and limited range (about 13km before you can’t fire them) but the limited range isn’t much of a hindrance. They’re poorly zeroed in, however and tend to over and undershot targets.

Because this is 1910s/20s battlecruiser, the AA is non existent and what few AA guns there are have a habit of literally doing zero damage to aircraft. As in direct impact to the cockpit for nothing sort of zero damage.

Given this is such a low tier battlecruiser - emphasis on cruiser (because of ass for armor) - the only comparison is probably Graf Spee for playstyle with some differences.

I give it a painful score of 4/10. There’s some distinct advantages but the flaws are so obviously glaring that a new player’s going to struggle to get past the bottom of the team in most scenarios. Conversely, a decent or even good player may be stuck in the middle in most scenarios.

It’s at least capable of doing things in a 6.7 match which is a huge advantage but being made of paper and whatnot hurts Glorious tremendously.

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It’s the same guns mounted to our 7.7s but on a 5.7, it’s gunna have limitations.

Iirc, what we have in game was what Glorious was going to be but became an aircraft carrier instead

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And subsequently thrown away alongside Acasta and Aosta to mine a Norwegian port.

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Someday we’ll get the half sister HMS Furious for even more bizarre actions, it trades Glorious’s dual 15" for single 18" turrets (going as designed with both batteries), but does away with the poor 4" cannons for eleven 5.5" cannons that would be better against surface targets.

Still as Glorious goes forget the tertiary 3" HA HAA gun & use your secondary 4" HA guns as impromptu HAA, they’ve got incredibly high elevation angles & can be used decently as AA albeit must be contact hits (wish thry had shrapnel shells).

Sidenote, the torpedoes are surprisingly good when I used it to cause mass barrages of them.

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I generally don’t bother with in-hull torpedoes both because of the extra chance of detonation but also because you’re almost never in range. Plus fixed angle requires exposing too much of the ship.

I should have mentioned them to begin with though.

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I haven’t touched naval in a while (because Gaijin seem to want us to play WoWS instead of what we had), but it does seem like a notably worse Graf Spee.

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It effectively is.

Spee has smaller guns yeah but she has 50% more and reloads a third faster with a smaller profile, actual AA suite and better maneuverability. Also ridiculously good toroedo angles.

Sure she loses out on a little bit of speed and at .3 higher in battle rating but that’s the price to pay for an actually good ship.

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Ardent. Sorry.

If only the truth were that good…

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Oh, it was Ardent. I will take the L on that.

Churchill wanted the port mined to prevent steel being shipped back to Germany. Pointless endeavor because a new steel route was found a week after the Scharnhorst twins had their way with the three.

What’s infuriating was the series of events leading up to the sinking as both ships were spotted moving towards Glorious by an observation station that willingly chose not to report it. And that’s not including the months before the loss to begin with.

The resulting inquisition into the loss of Glorious had the record sealed out of pure embarrassment and publicly threw the captain of Glorious under the bus. Think they’re unsealed sometime around 2045 iirc. British admiralty as a whole has a baffling track record of incompetence when it comes to its ships.

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No - it was actually completed as this in 1916, and saw action in the 2nd battle of Heligold Bight in 1917… was converted to a carrier from 1924-1930.

This is all just from the wiki article so feel free to check it out…

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It was a Swedish port, and they were hardly “thrown away” even if this particular massive set of assumption and presumption was true - which is far from certain.

Military operations entail risk - sometimes they pay off, often they do not, and with disastrous consequences.

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Swore it was a port off Norway.

Gonna have to hit the books again at this rate since it seems I’m getting even basic locations wrong.

That’s not the argument. The argument is putting blame on things that happen on people who don’t deserve it. It was Churchill’s stupid plot to begin with and every bit of blame was placed on Guy O’Dyly-Hughes. Who just so happened to be unable to defend himself because he was KIA. Along with almost every other crewman lost in the operation.

Not that he was completely innocent, due to a variety of reasons but that’s beside the point.

Regardless, the fact remains as such: Two destroyers and a carrier were lost with only some damage to Scharnhorst to show for it.

Given the Admiralty probably knew German ships were likely in the general area, that alone should have seen even a threat assessment. Clearly, caution was thrown to the wind.

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Thanks for the nod, and great review. I agree that it leaves a lot to be desired. I was hoping for more from this ship given its history.

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See above.

Your minimalistic statement of “some damage to Scharnhorst” was 48 killed and 6 months in Kiel to repair

One of the things that was noted later was that a carrier was supposed to have 4 DD’s as escort minimum… in this case they were probably lucky they didn’t do so as that would have been 2 more gone.

Apparently the ARMY knew, but didn’t pass it on as they assumed the Navy would already know.

Also Bletchley Park had some signals intel they passed on, but their reliability was not yet established and so it was not considered as such.

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48 men killed out of nearly 2000 crew. While almost 1500 were lost by the British. Vs 48.

So yeah, 6 months in port for repairs is nothing in comparison to the 1500 men that never went back to their loved ones on just one side.

A ship can be repaired so long as it isn’t sunk (…in most cases. Some ships were refloated after all.)

That is where my ire lies. Not the ships themselves but the men that didn’t need to die.

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Isn’t the current dit something about the Skipper wanting to court martial/be court martialled, and so instead of waiting for the heavies to finish demolishing Narvik, they accepted the risk of 2 destroyers escort?

Nevermind the fact there was no standing Air Patrol and nothing spotted on deck…

I really could say something here. Couldn’t I? Couldn’t I really?

Hence Assumption is the mother of all buzzer ups

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Yep.

You wanna talk about the loss of HMS Edinburgh? Because the captain refused to believe his radar operator?

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Not believing Radar Operators and losing ships is a common theme (see Glasgow/Sheff)