The Drydock - Episode 279 (Part 2)

00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:32 - Airborne attack on the High Sea Fleet on 1st November 1918?

00:11:03 - Royal Navy Turret naming?

00:18:25 - How many navies observe the crossing of the equator tradition?

00:24:07 - Half Pay in the 20th century?

00:29:18 - 'Losing' a ship to get around naval treaties?

00:32:20 - What notable actions were Japanese patrol planes involved in?

00:37:03 - Wind gauge in the age of sail and the age of steam

00:44:43 - Warships entering Pearl Harbor render passing honors to the wreck of USS Arizona and those entering Sydney render passing honors to the HMAS Sydney memorial. Are there any other such traditions you are aware of?

00:46:04 - There are several tall ships such as the USCGC Eagle, NRP Sagres, Gorch Fock and the Amerigo Vespucci that are all used as both training ships and ceremonial vessels. Can you explain why navies or the coast guard continue to use rigged ships for training, and where the tradition of keeping a fully rigged ship as a sort of national ambassador comes from?

00:51:29 - During the first half of the 20th century what are the pros and cons of geared drives and electric drives relative to each other for surface ships?

01:03:44 - Jet/Rocket powered boats in WW2?

01:07:38 - Assuming you wanted to design a semi-practical cruiser/battleship-sized vessel at 40 knots (so nothing is allowed to run from it) and at least 15 inch guns, is that possible using interwar/WWII-era technology?

01:16:56 - The development and significance of water condensers for letting steam engines become useful propulsion for naval craft?

01:21:02 - Can you tell us more about this character running the HMS Canopus' engine room in the lead up to Coronel?

01:25:41 - What is the modern convention for English ships during the Interregnum, and what was used at the time?

01:28:12 - If you have a battleship under construction, how long is it on the slipway before being pushed out for final completion? How much of the ship is finished?

01:31:00 - Was there a special Christmas ration for the US or Royal Navy sailor and what did it look like in the theatres of the Atlantic, Pacifc and Indian Ocean?

01:34:12 - Any notable examples of a subordinate commander ignoring orders and "opportunistically" leading, say, a squadron under his command into a perilous situation for which the enemy promptly chastised him (or the rest of the fleet)?

01:38:18 - Why did the Royal Navy revert HMS Vindictive back into a heavy cruiser instead of doing a full conversion like HMS Furious?

01:41:59 - What could have been done to make conning towers a more popular choice to use in battles?

01:49:46 - How often were carrier pigeons used by age of sail ships for communications and considering their effectiveness later, do you think they should have been more widely used?

01:54:16 - Did battleships have hydrophones and sonar?

01:57:41 - Battleship 'live' gun tests?

02:07:42 - Could you talk a little bit about HMS Diamond Rock and it's somewhat unusual construction?

02:11:37 - How big of a gap in capability is there between the 'best' pre-dreadnought and the 'worst' Dreadnought?

02:21:01 - On the Second Northern War — in your opinion what did the Swedes do wrong in the Battle of the Sound, given their slightly larger fleet? And what did the Dutch and Danes do wrong at Ebeltoft for that matter?

02:27:06 - Has there ever been a really uneconomical 'refit' for prestige/stuborness reasons?

02:33:17 - Why didn't the British source timber from Canada?

02:37:23 - Raising and restoring a wreck?

02:46:05 - If you have seen it, what are your thoughts about the film Godzilla: Minus One, on its depiction of several different IJN Navy vessels?

02:50:39 - Given the track record of SMS Emden, was Graf Spee wrong when he tried to get his squadron back to Germany instead of dispersing it and wrecking as much havoc as possible?

02:53:52 - Why didn’t more nations (particularly the US) adopt the all-gun-forward arrangement used in the design of Richelieu and Nelson?

02:57:04 - What nation in the period the channel covers would benefit most from modern resource maps & extraction methods & for which era?

02:59:27 - Were old destroyers better or worse than AMC's for convoy escort?

03:02:12 - Was there much of a drawdown in the Allied forces in the Mediterranean after the Italian surrender?

03:05:01 - Drydock Medal and Shipshape rewards update

[jpl]

Mentally watching Drach pull his hair out over turret designation, is a great way to go into the new year. Thank you for being you.

[kidmohair]

the phrase,
"...Beatty launching a mass Cuckoo attack..."
with all the permutations of the meaning of cuckoo...
struck a chord with me.

[greenseaships]

Listening to Drach crack up talking about 400-500 foot long engineering space on the 40+ knot battlecruiser has been the Drydock highlight of the year! HAPPY NEW YEAR DRACH!

[michaelimbesi]

The 40-kt battlecruiser is probably a little more feasible than you’ve assumed. The SHP/ton required to reach a given speed goes down as the ship gets larger, because of the square-cube law. Essentially, fluid friction is a function of the surface area (proportional to length squared) and displacement is a function of the volume (proportional to length cubed). And a ship 1200’ long would probably be better at a slightly wider beam than you assumed, more like 120’.

[mattblom]

Drach with a dig at Midway's historical inaccuracy vs. Godzilla Minus One. My friend Eric Petey was FX supervisor on Midway. I shall issue him a harsh reprimand and put him on half-pay and shore duties for his errors 😊

[pedenharley]

Regarding restoring a wreck: I wonder how Ryan would react upon being told: “Congratulations, you are now curator of the salvaged USS Pennsylvania, BB38, which is now occupying the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard dry dock. Good luck!” If preserving a ship that has been floating for 80 years is a challenge, what would preserving a 110-year-old ship that’s been submerged for 75 years be like? This is assuming that Pennsylvania can be found, is substantially intact, and doesn’t still glow in the dark. It would be nice to have a standard on display, though. I can’t help but think it would just be far cheaper and easier to build a replica if we are already spending billions. At which point, let’s please just invest in the existing Philly/Camden fleet by getting BB62 and Olympia into drydock and give SS United States the refit she deserves and let sleeping sunken battleships lie.

[johnfisher]

Thanks for all your hard work in providing these wonderful informative videos. Maybe we need a T-shirt captioned "I survived a Patreon Dry Dock"
That Cuckoo attack would be even more devastating when you consider that, unlike most other navy's, German sailors did not live on their ships but when in harbor left them and lived ashore. By the time the crews got back to their ships, IF they felt like it, the progressive flooding might be uncontrollable.

[kommandantgalileo]

Drach trying to make a functioning 40-knot battleship is hilarious.

[hancehanson]

YEAH!, YEAH!!, let's have an episode on desperate, late-war, cockamamie Kriegsmarine E-boot designs/builds/implementation, please!

P.S.: Hey 'Drach--- have you yet ever done a deep-dive on the [hydrogen-peroxide? fueled] hyper-speed Walther turbines the Kriegsmarine was experimenting with? If not-- can we have a DEEEP-dive into the origin, development, technical-specs, & all of that?.... pretty-please?

[The_Modeling_Underdog]

Listening to Drach totally lose it on half a million hp gear turbines is solid gold.

Also we got the Gin Palace back on The Drydock.

Effin' dandy.

[GrahamWKidd]

Fresh Drach! Saturday night - Hot off the press!!
Last Drydock for 2023!!

[funkymonkeyk]

Glad to hear you enjoyed Godzilla: Minus One as much as I did, as I was watching the film here in the US about a month ago I knew it'd pop up as a topic in a Drydock episode at some point lol.

[fabianzimmermann]

Regarding British turret naming, HMS Tiger's rear superfiring turret was named Q turret, despite not being amidships. All her machinery and funnels were ahead of the turret and the turret thus had the same complete firing arc to the rear that the rearmost turret had. But because the turret was a bit further away from the rearmost turret than usual and because the Lion's all had a Q turret, Tiger also had a Q turret, despite it not making any real sense.

[DERP_Squad]

In regards to homing pigeons as a communication method, they would have major difficulty navigating at sea. Tracking beacons on pigeons has shown fairly conclusively that they use visual navigation as much as any innate homing ability to get back home. If you take them beyond a few miles from land there is nothing to navigate by, and chances are they'd just fly in circles above the ship for a bit, see nothing near by, and land back on the ship as it is the only thing that isn't water in sight.

[jlvfr]

For a perfect example of "spending too much money for too little in one ship", I nominate the post war refit of _HMS Victorious_ . While the ship did became a more-or-less efective post WWII carrier, it never carried the number of intended planes. But the worse part was that the refit took 8 years, and the budget went from _5 to 30 million pounds_ . In a cash-strapped post WWII RN, this efectivelly killed any large refits to other carriers.

[Toreno]

Thanks for answering my question!

With regards to the vision slits, the French tried to solve a similar problem on their Char 2C super heavy tanks by using stroboscopic cupola's, where slits were placed on an outer cupola that rotated at a certain speed, while the commander looked through vision blocks in the inner cupola and due to an optical illusion could see out of the cupola while theoretically remaining protected.

That said it couldn't be done for the whole conning tower due to the scale though maybe a small viewing area could work on this principle, though I can't see it being too popular.

[Edax_Royeaux]

1:34:19 For reference, Dan Sickles moving his Corps ahead into a indefensible position isn't true, he moved his Corps onto an immensely defensible position, the infamous Devil's Den. A position so awful to attack that Longstreet dragged his feet having to conduct that assault, which perhaps saved the day for the Union. Sickles also moved his forces onto the Peach Orchard which flanked the Confederate attack and caused immense damage to Anderson's attack. The problem however is that Sickles moved his Corps forward without orders and left gaps in the line that had to be filled in at the very last second with reserves. It was a good position to hold but it needed to have been coordinated with Meade, the lack of coordination resulted in chaos in trying to rebuild the line.

[ROBERTN-util]

The USCG, which operates the International Ice Patrol, has a ceremony every year on the anniversary of RMS Titanic's sinking to place a wreath into the water above the wreck.

[jackvonkuehn]

Yes we must have a Wed video on the insane German rocket boats!!!!

[BleedingUranium]

Very happy to hear praises for Godzilla Minus One, it really is a phenomenal film! Looking forward to hearing more about it (and its ships) in the future. :)