Warship Appreciation Thread
- Thread starter Husky_Khan
- Start date
Doomsought
Well-known member
That is prubably the best possible outcome for that sort of malfunction. It exploded outside the ship's magazine after all. Still, the malfunction happening at all ought to leave your crew and munitions supplier humiliated.
BF110C4
Well-known member
The crew is too busy thanking god for their survival to feel humiliated. The officer in charge of the maintenance of the missile system on the other hand is busy hiding from the rest of the sailors who are going to give him the mother of all blanket parties as soon as they change their soiled underwear.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
The Welman was a single-person midget submarine produced by the British in WW2. It's not well known because, well, it didn't do anything. The design has some real headscratchers, f'rex they decided it should have one big explosive charge it would magnetically attach to the bottom of enemy ships rather than torpedoes (This didn't work for the Turtle and would prove not to work again) and gave it absolutely no ability to deal with torpedo nets that would be a problem for that strategy. On top of that the only visibility was tiny glass ports on the conning tower, it had no periscope and had to surface to see where it was going, and even then the operator's eyes were so close to the waterline they could barely see.
Needless to say the Welmans didn't sink anything. The single operation tried with them lead to one being captured when the Germans spotted it on the surface after it hit a torpedo net, and the other three were scuttled when surprise was lost.
In defeat, however, the Welmans inflicted significant losses to the Nazis, as they took apart the captured model and used it as inspiration for their own wunderwaffen midget submarine, the Biber, which was nearly as useless as the Welman but the Nazis built lots more of them and tried to use them several more times, and the Bibers thus failed a lot more.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
At least ze Germans had the presence of mind to arm it with torpedoes and gave it a periscope, thus making it a slightly less flawed design.
Biber und Baum, Baum und Biber
Biber und Baum, Baum und Biber
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
The Biber was definitely a significant improvement over the Welman, honestly the whole "No torpedos, just a bomb charge you have to physically attach to the enemy ship's keel, and it has no way of bypassing known countermeasures for that" is perplexingly stupid and Bibers did well to switch to torpedoes. Even so, the Bibers were some weak ships. The first operation, they launched twenty-two of them. Only fourteen were able to make it out of the harbor Of those fourteen only two made it to the operational zone, and those two failed to do anything useful when they got there.
They did manage to sink one cargo vessel although I consider that great feat somewhat offset by the fact that eleven Bibers were sunk by a single torpedo... that was an accidental launch by one of the Bibers involved.
The idea of a one-man submarine fighter is quite cool and looks great in fiction but just doesn't work in real life.
They did manage to sink one cargo vessel although I consider that great feat somewhat offset by the fact that eleven Bibers were sunk by a single torpedo... that was an accidental launch by one of the Bibers involved.
The idea of a one-man submarine fighter is quite cool and looks great in fiction but just doesn't work in real life.
paulobrito
Well-known member
Eleven killed by a single torpedo? Must be a record.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
From the report it seems they were bunched up in harbor, having just launched when some idiot shot a torpedo right into the tail of the Biber ahead of him, and the rest of the squadron were so close they all got hull ruptures from the blast.
All eleven were dredged up and salvaged later.
paulobrito
Well-known member
So, the mother of fuck-ups?
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
There were multiple worse ones during WWII, I recall there was an accident that wiped out entire Shinyo staging area and there was an accident that started a chain reaction on landing ships staging in Pearl Harbor.
During WW2, big french mine-layer "Pluton" blow up in harbour,too./Casablanca/
Russia Practices Destroying Enemy Carriers In Pacific Drills Sending U.S. Alarm Bells Ringing
Russia’s Pacific Fleet has been flexing its muscles not far from Hawaii as the U.S. military gears up for an apparent missile test in the area.
www.thedrive.com
Uh, so Russia is doing some...exercises off Hawaii. This is apparently what caused the F-22 scrambles out of Honolulu.
bintananth
behind a desk
That would be the Port Chicago Disaster. Several thousand tons of explosives suddenly went "BOOM!"
Mutsu's magazine explosion was likely caused by a spark in an old wiring harness that really should have replaced during a refit.
Then there's the magazine explosion which occured when Yamato was sinking. The resulting mushroom cloud was seen roughly 100 miles away.
If we can do FONOPS, so can they. The tradeoff is we get to see exactly how run-down their ships are. . . always embarrassing.
Heh, at least the Russkie's aren't having to tow the Kuz around again.
The Port Chicago Disaster and its aftermath played a *huge* role in pushing forward racial desegregation in the U.S. military. You see, roughly two-thirds of the sailors killed by that explosion were black Americans, and this was specifically because of "menial" logistics tasks being overwhelmingly assigned to segregated units (even though those units were not in fact trained or equipped for those duties). In the immediate aftermath of the explosion, the white officers commanding the segregated ammunition-handling units were all granted hardship leave, while the black enlisted men were ordered to clean up the aftermath and then get back to work unloading ammunition using the same unsafe handling procedures which had caused the explosion.
Ultimately, 258 African-American enlisted sailors refused to continue unloading ammunition without safe procedures and were court-martialed; two hundred eight for the lesser offense of "disobeying orders", and fifty charged with the death penalty offense of mutiny in time of war. All were convicted, although no death sentences were handed down due to the "mitigating circumstances" of the explosion; they were only sentenced to eight to fifteen years hard labor, and those sentences were commuted postwar. The sheer vindictiveness with which the Navy handled the situation drew the attention of the President, which ultimately led to his 1948 order to desegregate the military.
Aaron Fox
Well-known member
Yeah, you can really thank the Dixies and Wildrow Wilson for that clusterfuck. That and people like Benjamin 'Pitchfork' Tillman constantly starving the USN of money to retain procedures and whatnot.