I would be very surprised about the inacurracy of the 4.5" guns, since we were hitting our targets in three rounds or less.
HMS Ardent took out an Argentine supply vessel in Falklands sound in only a few rounds.
One Exocet was taken down by a 4.5" shell.
Those guns were extremely accurate, far more so than the Army field pieces, but given the systems behind the Navy guns, this sould not be too surprising.
As for the ally superstructure, we had loads of other problems long before the Falklands war.
One big problem is that is does not flex like a steel hulled vessel, the older Rothsay and Leander frigates were superb sea keeping ships, part of that was the way the bows were built, the profile of them, and one other part is that they were designed to flex just aft of the bows and just in front of the forward superstructure.
The ally ships, largely built by Yarrows, did not have the same flexing point built in, and the high superstruture, relative to the older leanders actually made them less flexible.
The only way they could be built so tall was to reduce the suprestructure weight, this was done using alluminium.
Trouble with this is that the sea found its own ways to force the type 21 frigates and the type 42 destroyers to flex (the type 42 were a bit more flexible and so din’t suffer as much - especially the llater lengthened ones)
The result was that although the Yarrow built ally superstruture ships looked nice, they had the unfortunate habit of work hardening, and carcking the superstructure about two thirds along it. It meant that they had to weld large girders across the cracks, but that tended to just move the cracking problem elsewhere.
This used to cause me endless problems, as the telephone exchange room where I did most of my work from used to get the benefit of sea water leaking in, not really all that good for the equipment in there.
When HMS Ardent(type 21 frigate) was destroyed, the thing that did for her was the fire in the helo hanger.
Helo fuel burns hot and the fire crew couldn’t get the blaze under control, if they had been able to do this, she would have probably retained a significant part of her fighting ability.
When she went down, the crew was evacuated to other ships, so word got around about what ocurred.
The fire could not be brought under control because of the superstructure in that area, though it has to be also said that she was hit again and again, and its a testament to the modern methods of design and construction that she remained afloat having taken so many hits.
I’m not sure that the ally superstructure was the main culprit, it played a part, but you have to also consider that running from stem to stern, there are miles of cabling with copper conductors, and these will melt at a lower temperature than ally does, and this would make life hard for any firefighter.
The main problem, certainly in the case of HMS Sheffield, was the loss of firemain pressure when it was breached.
Protocol demands that when sailing in a hot zone, the firemain is isolated into sections, with three out of the four fire pumps running and the main divided into 3 sections.
At the time of the Exocet strikes, Sheffield was cruising with just one pump running, to for a while the only way to fight the fire was with handheld appliances.
The time lost getting the other pumps running and isolating the damaged section of firemain pipework may well have been critical to the loss of the ship.
Its noteworthy that her skipper Capt Salt didn’t recieve a campaign medal when all the other CO’s did. This might have been rectified since, but I do remember it being commented upon when the original Falklands medal was handed out.
