runsforcelery wrote:For that matter, the Long Lance came with a nasty hidden price tag: liquid oxygen stored in the torpedoes themselves and in reservoirs aboard ship. Care to guess what happened when they took a shell hit and the fires started? At least one of the Japanese heavies disabled by destroyer gunfire and torpedoes off Samar probably succumbed to the explosion of her own torpedoes.
Yes, though compressed oxygen, not liquid oxygen:
"The second type air gas (oxygen) was stored at 225 atm in a 980-liter main chamber made by machining a block of nickel chromium-molybdenum steel, an alloy first developed for battleship armour." sayeth wikipedia.
Period cryogenics would have been challenged to keep oxygen liquid under shipboard conditions.
Compare the serious period (ca. 1930) design for a moon rocket, ca. five stages, as created by a real engineer and published in Amazing. Hydrogen was ruled out as a fuel in favor of iirc gasoline because of the challenges in keeping the fuel liquid. It weighed have weighed about twice what a Saturn V did, which is really pretty good as an estimate.