Naval Pictures X: Underway on Nuclear Power

[Colt Ward]

The battleship USS Wisconsin (BB-64) and a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser (either USS Leyte Gulf (CG-55) or USS San Jacinto (CG-56)) sit at anchor in the harbor during the fourth annual Fleet Week activities, 1991.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

I'm not aware of minimum arming distance for large calibre naval shells, but if AP shells hit anything less solid/hard than several inches of hardened armour it was not uncommon for them to simply punch through and out the other side without the bursting charge detonating. It actually made smaller/unarmoured ships like DDs and AMCs surprisingly hard to sink with larger shells.

Yeah, I remember that was one of the things that contributed to the US forces winning the Battle of Leyte Gulf because the armor-piercing shells that the Japanese ships were firing (because they were expecting to be facing battleships) tended to go through the tiny US destroyers, destroyer escorts, and escort carriers without causing excessive damage.

In the film, the shells are shown exploding as they hit Godzilla from mere tens of meters, but of course it's Godzilla so all they do is make him mad.

[worktroll]

IIRC, the shock of firing arms the fuses. For AP shells, the shock of hitting the target triggers a short delay fuse.

And again IIRC, the British in WW1 had the opposite problem - the shock of impact triggering the explosive load directly (Lyddite?), and 'soft' armor-piercing caps causing most heavy calibre shells to explode on impact, on the outside, and failing to damage anything.

[ANS Kamas P81]

What ship is she?

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

What ship is she?

In the movie?  The Takao.  Though the movie takes place in 1947 (after a prologue in 1945), a year after the Takao was sunk in real life.

[glitterboy2098]

bringing over a discussion that started in the aviation thread but really belongs here, being naval.

35 and rainy is shorts, a windbreaker and scarf for me these days.  The worst I've experienced is dry dock in winter at Groton, CT.  I gave up my rack and retreated to the wardroom (which had a portable heater blowing into it).  The bench wasn't really comfortable, but that little bit of extra heat made ALL the difference...  When the steam's out, boats are COLD.

A big mass of metal sitting in cold water?  That makes sense.

Worse... a big mass of metal sitting in the cold air for weeks on end.

It certainly puts all those 19th Century Northwest Passage explorers getting iced-in into perspective. A large mass of wood in even colder weather for months is almost certainly hellish!

No matter what, cold is cold. I feel for you guys. I wouldn't want to be on a boat or ship for a long period regardless of the weather.

Wood doesn't conduct cold as readily as metal does, but yeah.  Especially since due to the flammability of wooden ships there were typical serious restrictions on fires.

Indeed. The point is, being on a ship in cold weather is probably unfortunate.

IIRC several of the later ones had steam engines aboard. not to run propulsion, but to generate hot water in the boiler, which would be circulated through pipes around the ship to keep things warm. and to help cook hot beverages and food.

didn't help the Franklin expedition in the long run though.

That's because the pipes were lead.

So was the canned food.

The lead soldering of the tin cans was exponentially worse than the lead pipes, whose danger is grossly overstated anyway, as lead pipes wouldn't leak more than trace amounts in the lifetime of user and that is not taking into account mineral buildup in the pipes.

Lead pipes, and lead solder, weren't the problem. Lead doesn't dissolve easily in water. The problem is mild acids. Consider that the Romans used lead cups to hold wine & drink wine out of, and lead bowls to boil down unfermented grape juice. Both lead to the formation of lead carbonate, which dissolved easily, and had a pleasant sweet taste of its own which the Romans liked.

SO depending on what was in the tin, this may not have been a problem. Early tins weren't tin - they were iron, and rusted, which was bad for the food inside. So they gave it a 'wash' of tin, which prevented rusting - but if you dented the can, this broke the layer, which led to the iron underneath rusting, and the food spoiling. Remember, fellow oldies, being told not to pick dented cans? That's the memory of that.

Cans now are steel (which doesn't rust unless badly made, or badly treated), or aluminium (which doesn't rust due to forming a protective layer of oxide.) Either way, denting a modern can lightly is not a risk.

the biggest issue the franklin expedition had was how sloppily the soldering on their canned goods was.. a lot of the stuff went bad with botulism, and the lead poisoning issue has been found to be over-estimated in later scientific studies of the remains found. though that was largely because trace lead in stuff was all too common at the time, so the amount they were getting from their canned goods probably wasn't much worse than the amounts they were getting before the expedition. the level and isotope ratios didn't support the hypothesis that they were poisoned by the lead solder.

their biggest issue was apparently one or more of the crew had Tuberculosis (which was also fairly common at the time, sadly), and it spread after they got stuck in the ice. probably because of suppressed immune systems.. all the remains that were found and studied showed extreme zinc deficiency, which combined with the conditions and lousy diet would have meant they'd have had trouble fighting off infections. in fact the recent studies point to these health issues as being part of why it seemed like the lead was the culprit.. between the illnesses and starvation, their bodies were breaking their own fat and muscle down, releasing any stored lead in the process.
 

[Colt Ward]

USS Bismarck Sea (CVE-95) loading Douglas SBD Dauntless Dive bombers from a barge, 1944.

[Colt Ward]

Japanese ocean liner Tatsuta Maru transiting as a repatriation ship, as seen through the periscope of the USS Kingfish (SS-234), October 1942.

[Colt Ward]

USS Bennington sailing by the wreck of USS Arizona, Honolulu, US Territory of Hawaii, 30 May 1958.

[Colt Ward]

Dutch Colossus class carrier Karel Doorman in 1960. This ship was sold to Argentina in 1968 as Veinticinco de Mayo.

[I am Belch II]

Car-go Carrier!!!

[Giovanni Blasini]

And now for something completely different: the anniversary gift my wife got me for our 8th anniversary yesterday (see attached).

It's a brass bookmark inset with teak wood from the deck of the USS California (BB-44).

[mikecj]

The battleship USS Wisconsin (BB-64) and a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser (either USS Leyte Gulf (CG-55) or USS San Jacinto (CG-56)) sit at anchor in the harbor during the fourth annual Fleet Week activities, 1991.

I was there for that Fleet Week.  There's nothing like seeing a manned, combat capable battleship enter NY Harbor.

[Colt Ward]

You know, if I was a battleship captain in the 80s . . . I would have wanted the Imperial March playing from the loudspeakers whenever the ship came into port.

just a random thought

[Euphonium]

You know, if I was a battleship captain in the 80s . . . I would have wanted the Imperial March playing from the loudspeakers whenever the ship came into port.

just a random thought

I would have gone for Hearts of Oak, but different navy.... 

[Daryk]

Gio: that is SO COOL!! :)

[Colt Ward]

USS Cassin Young (DD-793), now a National Historic Landmark since 1986, is one of only four surviving Fletcher-class destroyers still afloat.

[kato]

First steel cut for first F126 this week. Ship is to be delivered 2028. 10,500 tons, 166m length. Still called a frigate.

[nerd]

1. Ship classifications are as much politics as they are technical now.

2. When posting pictures, used {img width=500}url{/img}.
Like so:


Clicking the picture will embiggen.

[ANS Kamas P81]

"Designed to be continuously deployed with minimal maintenance for up to two years and operate for 5000 hours per year"

I can't even imagine what kind of shape she'll be in after two years.  Remember that American ship that finally returned to port after 11 months, and how dilapidated and rusted her hull and superstructure were?  Doubling that, with "minimal maintenance" and likely minimal crew...yikes.

I'm also a lot bit surprised at how light the armament is for a ship of that size.  16 VLS cells, a 5" gun, eight NSMs, and two RAM launchers for point defense.  That and a handful of machine guns.  Compared to a Tico, which is a thousand tons lighter, but carries 122 VLS cells, eight Harpoons, two 5" guns, two CWIS, and six torpedo tubes.  It's twice the firepower, if you load the 16 VLS on the F126 with quad-packs of SAMs, and almost eight times as much if you're loading full cell shots like cruise missiles, antiship missiles, ASROCs, or others - and the Tico can quad-pack enough ESSMs to turn an entire Air Force into aluminum confetti.

I get the idea of the multirole mission modules, but seriously, you're building a heavy cruiser by WWII's standards and you're only arming it to that level?  Something feels left behind pretty dramatically.

[kato]

I get the idea of the multirole mission modules, but seriously, you're building a heavy cruiser by WWII's standards and you're only arming it to that level? 

The F126 frigates are basically F125 (7200 tons) by general ship design with some "updates"; on top of that adding in a VLS for self-defense purposes (64 ESSM Block 2) and a second flexible space for an "ASW module".

I can't even imagine what kind of shape she'll be in after two years.  Remember that American ship that finally returned to port after 11 months, and how dilapidated and rusted her hull and superstructure were?  Doubling that, with "minimal maintenance" and likely minimal crew...yikes.

The German Navy has regularly deployed corvettes abroad for up to 18 months continuously over the last ten years, switching flown-in crews in-theater.

[chanman]

1. Ship classifications are as much politics as they are technical now.

Always has been, whether you're talking about the USN 1975 re-classification or the interwar naval treaties - hard to get more political than those, plus of course the vagaries of translation across languages.

In my mind though, using frigate as a catch-all term for multi-role surface warships has a pleasing symmetry to it, bringing us full circle back to steam frigates as the general-purpose warships. It makes prefect sense for the French to drop their destroyer classifications entirely, since contre-torpilleur and torpilleur don't make much sense in the missile age. The same goes for the plethora of classifications that the Italians used.

It's more interesting to me that everyone seemed to have a need to describe missle-age 'ocean-going surface warship' and 'coastal surface warship' and grabbed onto the previously-out-of-use names of frigate and corvette respectively despite both terms being brought back by the British to describe the completely unrelated concepts of cheap, slow merchant-standard ASW ships for escorting convoys because they were far too slow by design to keep up with dedicated warships.

And the wide range of 'frigates' from the 2250 ton Belgian Wielingen-class to the upcoming 10,000+ ton monsters like the F126 or Hunter-class neatly mirrors the pre-dreadnought trend of calling everything a cruiser, and actually over very similar displacement ranges.

HMS Adventure, scout cruiser, commissioned 1905, 2700 ton displacement


HMS Warrior, armoured cruiser, commissioned 1906, 13500 ton displacement normal load

[Colt Ward]

USS Wisconsin

[Colt Ward]

Something I have never really seen displayed in public . . .

USS SAM RAYBURN" (SSBN-635) Showing the 16 Hatches for Her UGM-27 Polaris Missiles; Each Carrying 3 x W58 Thermonuclear MIRV Warheads of 200 kT Each

[Colt Ward]

Uncompleted hull of battleship USS Kentucky (BB-66)

[Daryk]

Something's wrong with that last image tag... Not sure what caused it to fail...

[worktroll]

Used Modly powers - had "wdth" not "width", all good now!

[Grognard]

Something I have never really seen displayed in public . . .

USS SAM RAYBURN" (SSBN-635) Showing the 16 Hatches for Her UGM-27 Polaris Missiles; Each Carrying 3 x W58 Thermonuclear MIRV Warheads of 200 kT Each

I HAVE this PHOTO framed!  30x20-ish, with a signed USN matte, in a nice walnut frame, given to me by a retired MCPO who served on that boat.
I spent 12 days doing A&B tasker and was given an attaboy and this framed photo.
I'd take a pic of it and post it, but it is in storage.

[kato]

And the wide range of 'frigates' from the 2250 ton Belgian Wielingen-class to the upcoming 10,000+ ton monsters like the F126 or Hunter-class neatly mirrors the pre-dreadnought trend of calling everything a cruiser, and actually over very similar displacement ranges.

The Wielingen class would probably be called a corvette today. That designation is blowing up massively in size in Europe lately - Finland's Pohjanmaa "corvettes" will be 4300 tons.

[Daryk]

Used Modly powers - had "wdth" not "width", all good now!

Thanks Worktroll!  I totally missed that missing "i"... :)