World of Warships: Possible Super-Shimakaze coming soon
2 min readLooks like the Wargaming team feels like teasing us today. After the O-class from this morning, they posted the picture of another ship surrounded by mist. This time, it is a Japanese destroyer.
As you can see, the picture doesn’t show us much except the main armament being possibly composed of a single turret at the front and 2 superfiring turrets at the rear.
Now, let’s get rid of some of that mist.
It confirms the main armament of 3 turrets and also reveals a torpedo launcher. At this point, it’s all down to theory-crafting.
When focusing on the turrets, at first, I thought that these were 100 mm/65 Type 98. However, when comparing with these turrets, as someone pointed me out, the barrels are too short to be 100 mm guns. Also, the roof of the turret is flatter.
These turrets also can’t be any of the 127 mm turrets that we have in the game right now because none of them has a similar shape. After some digging, I found a possible solution. The Japanese 127 mm/50 Type 1 (or Type 5 for the land-based version). This new 127 mm twin turret was meant as an improvement over the 127 mm/50 third year and the 100 mm/65 Type 98 which means that it was planned to be dual-purpose. They also had a better rate of fire than the 3rd Year Type with between 13 and 18 rounds per minute. However, not much is known about it as only a single prototype was ever built and it was a land-based version. If you want, you can learn more about this prototype here.
Now that the main battery is clear, let’s talk about the hull. The first guess from me was that the ship was possibly a Super-Shimakaze (or Project V6). There wasn’t much difference with the Shimakaze herself except that it was a mass-produced version with 16 planned units. In the end, the project was canceled after the battle of Midway.
Here is now a comparison of the X ship and with Shimakaze:
Sadly, the perspective screws things a bit but the superstructure us for the visible part almost identical, the gun placement is the same and that torpedo tube is at the exact same position as well. The chances are pretty high to see a Shimakaze but more gunboat oriented with maybe F3 torpedoes or something like that.
That’s for now all we can guess from that silhouette surrounded by mist. Just like for the O-class, we will certainly know more about it very soon.
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This destroyer could also have water bombs. At least that’s how it is written on Wikipedia. That might fit, considering that still submarines should come into the game.