The Drydock – Episode 284



00:00:00 – Intro

00:01:50 – Now that you have seen a number of different maritime museums from different countries which ones would you recommend that people go to visit?

00:06:03 – Diesel/Turbine Hybrids?

00:11:32 – Admiral Scheer wreck access?

00:14:41 – HMS X1 turrets

00:17:16 – Just how much does a steel-hulled submarine crush as it dives?

00:22:38 – How long does it take for a question to be answered in the drydock right now?

00:25:01 – How did the lookouts in Titanic and Yamato get up to the crows nest?

00:29:56 – White ‘wrapped’ carrier?

00:32:49 – What was the end-game at Komandorski Islands if Salt Lake City was crippled and destroyed by the IJN?

00:35:16 – What were the British equivilant of the Allen M Sumner’s and Gearing’s?

00:37:35 – Would you classify the USN PC(subchasers) as a corvette or large gunboat in WW2?

00:39:03 – Prior to the advent of gunpowder based weapons, did siege weapons such as catapults and ballista see wide spread use on ships, and if so how effective were they?

00:43:00 – How were Cook’s voyages possible?

00:48:06 – During the classic age of sail, what where the immediate preperations for combat?

00:52:58 – If the Soviet Union had allowed the US to use its territory to go after Japan, would a campaign where the US Navy strikes south from the Sakhalin islands be viable?

00:56:04 – In addition to VADM Fletcher. What other officers you think were unfortunately or prematurely reassigned away from the front?

00:59:15 – HMS Victory is 246 years old. Assuming continued funding, can we expect the more complex museum ships from the age of steam and steel to go on for as long, or do they have more of an inbuilt expiration date?

01:07:31 – February 2024 US Mini-Trip

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44 thoughts on “The Drydock – Episode 284”

  1. In Canada visit HMCS Sackville on Halifax NS smdHMCS Haids st Hamilton On
    They're the last of their classed, Flowrr class corvette and Tribal destroyer sole survivors of their classes.

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  2. When it comes down to Hull crushing there's a scene in a movie called down Periscope with Kelsey Grammer. Were they doing a test drive and the guy puts a string from one side of the hall to the other on the inside

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  3. On the question of steel hull shrinkage under pressure, smarter every day did an excellent video with the US navy that talked about that exact thing, even did the string test you mentioned around the 21 minute mark

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  4. Fun fact about submarines hulls: The artist Richard Serra who uses huge steel sheets has these formed into shape by a demilitarized machine that once made French nuclear submarines.

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  5. J.E.Gordon in "The New Science of Strong Materials" does a great job of explaining the molecular basis of work hardening. It is one of those books that makes one look at the world entirely differently.

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  6. I do understand that your concentration is on MILITARY ships, but still; the next time you are in the northeastern U.S. I heartily recommend you visit Mystic Seaport Museum. I was a member there for over half a century until I moved to the mountains of Tennessee, from back when it was The Mystic Marine Historical Society's museum, and my family were members of that society. Not only do they have a number of sailing ships, including the Charles W. Morgan, the last of the wooden whalers, and a whole town demonstrating life in a 19th century coastal port village, but one of the finest libraries of material on the subject, open for use by scholars. I am sure you would find it worth your time to spend a few days there.

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  7. When I was in grade school, in the US in the 1960s, I read a book on the USS Constitution (Old Ironsides) and in the last chapter it mentioned that school children had sent in pennies to help with a restoration of the ship decades prior. That was possible with a wooden hull frigate.
    Two decades later I was in Boston for my best friend's wedding and afterwards I was looking for something to do since I had a few more days leave left afterwards. I toured the USS Constitution and purchased a piece of wood from one of the restorations and made a donation.
    I have since toured several Essex class carriers from WWII and the scale difference is exceptional. 2000 metric tons displacement for the USS Constitution vs 33,500 metric tons for a long Essex.
    Being in one of the engine rooms of the USS Hornet felt like I was indoors inside a large building instead of tied up to a dock in Alameda, California. I had a sense of Boston Harbor when I was on the blood deck of the USS Constitution.

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  8. Naval historians these days seem to refer to all ships in history by their names. But I'm curious if back in the day the various navies knew the actual names of enemy ships they were fighting in real time. So for example, during the battle of Midway did the USN know the names of the IJN carriers they sank and conversely did the IJN know the names of the USN carriers present?

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  9. Naval Aviation Museum at NAS Pensacola is excellent, really hope you're able to work it out with them. Depending on how much time you've got on the Gulf Coast, the WW2 Museum and New Orleans and Ft Morgan/ Ft Gaines on Mobile Bay are also worth seeing.

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  10. one big challenge with the preservation of large ships is that we do not have the infrastructure to produce a lot of the materials used in their construction… whilst wooden shipwrightng is something of a lost art, it is something for which you do not need to build a great factory or dig a mine… no one makes Krup Steel these days, so you simply cannot replace cracked or rusted armor plates the way you could with a wooden hull…. nor can you as easily maintain the structure, every part needs to be sourced from some limited source… no way to really reproduce it in an environment where such materials will necessarily die out.

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  11. 47:50
    To be honest, and i dont want to belittle native civilizations , they really dont matter in the scheme of grand things.
    Like , proto incas where there , then they where not , and that has almost zero impact on world history.

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  12. Regarding submarine hull deformation, Destin from the youtube channel Smarter Everyday, has a series of videos where he goes aboard a US submarine and in one of them, some of the crew set up a string attached to either side of a compartment to demonstrate how much the hull deforms as it dives. (He also crawls into a torpedo tube and signs the interior of the exterior hatch!!)😳

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  13. Regarding the question of submarine hulls getting compressed underwater, @smartereveryday did a video series aboard the Los Angeles class USS Toledo about the various (unclassified) things SSNs do. Part of that involved spanning a bit of string between two sides of the boat in the torpedo room to illustrate just how much the boat gets compressed as it dives.

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  14. I can think of one steam and steel age ship as memorable as HMS Victory which should have been preserved and was not. It was arguably the "fightingest" ship in the RN in both world wars – HMS Warspite. It fought in pretty much all the big naval battles in both wars. it was perhaps the only battleship ever tasked with a combat mission in severely restricted waters – Narvik. It fired its main armament effectively many times against opponents and was essential to winning all the battles in which it was engaged.

    It was scrapped in 1947 because of the niggardliness of the Clement Atlee government. In all honesty, the Atlee government was dealing with a post-war Britain that was bankrupt. But if there had been a will, a way could have been found.

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  15. For consideration in the list of Officers transferred away from action command… Captain Gib Hoover USS Helena, following the 1st Naval Battle of Guadalcanal made a difficult decision to abandon USS Juneau survivors and was removed from active command by Admiral Halsey, ( no doubt influenced by the media latching on to the tragedy of the loss of the Sullivan Brothers amongst the terrible loss of life). Thus the USN was denied the services of an aggressive combat commander who was one of the few leaders at that time who understood the advantages of radar in night combat. What might have been if he had continued in command of the famous “machine gun cruiser” !!

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  16. Have you ever been to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago? The U-505 submarine is displayed completely intact there in its own exhibit. I highly recommend visiting it and touring the interior if you ever find yourself in Chicago.

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  17. While not navy ships, there are a couple old cargo ships in Superior, Wisconsin, including SS Meteor, the last whale-back, which has been under restoration. Apparently whale-backs were considered for navy use but were deemed, understandably, unseaworthy.

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  18. Another officer who was unfortunately reassigned was rear admiral Raizo Tanaka. He used his fast destroyers to resupply at night japanese forces at Guadalcanal, The Tokyo Express. He was also in command of the Japanese ships at the battle of Tassafaronga. After falling out or favor with the IJN High command he was transferred to Singapore at the end of 1942 and then to shore duty in Burma in 1943.

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