Warship Appreciation Thread

LordSunhawk

Das BOOT (literally)
Owner
Administrator
Staff Member
Founder
Same reason square riggers didn't capsize, tumblehome. Look at the shape, as the ship heels with the wind and waves, it presents less area to the wind, meanwhile more volume is in the water, increasing buoyancy and improving the righting arm.

Where tumblehome becomes a disadvantage is when dealing with flooding.
 

bintananth

behind a desk
Same reason square riggers didn't capsize, tumblehome. Look at the shape, as the ship heels with the wind and waves, it presents less area to the wind, meanwhile more volume is in the water, increasing buoyancy and improving the righting arm.

Where tumblehome becomes a disadvantage is when dealing with flooding.
Square riggers don't capsize because of heavy ballast down near the keel.

Tumblehome is actually bad for stability. What you really want is vertical sides or angled outward. Tumblehome was done because bigger guns have a longer recoil distance.
 

Doomsought

Well-known member
Modern warships have stability issues because they have their sensors to be high up to get the best line of sight, but modern sensors are also very heavy, lots of copper in them. Do to the rules of leverage, this is even worse than having guns mounted high up.
 

Husky_Khan

The Dog Whistler... I mean Whisperer.
Founder
Sotnik
The Hosho, Worlds first commissioned aircraft carrier (as in it was built to be an aircraft carrier) laid down in December of 1920. Look at them sidestacks!

l13gwic1bqv81.jpg


It served mostly as a testbed for aircraft carrier operations but saw service both in the Sino-Japanese War, its aircraft utilized to support ground operations, as well as in the later Pacific War including the Pearl Harbor and Midway operations where it provided distant cover, screening and supported anti-submarine operations before becoming a training a ship for the rest of the conflict. It was converted into doing repatriation trips for Japanese military personnel abroad after Japan's surrender and eventually scrapped in 1946.

Sauce
 

Captain X

Well-known member
Osaul
In spite of what risks there may be, I really do think this and other ships like it should be permanently dry-docked similar to how the HMS Victory is, unless they intend to keep the ship functional and able to move under its own power. And considering the U-505 has been out of the water for decades and is doing just fine, there's really no excuse not to do this for submarines.
 

Captain X

Well-known member
Osaul
I know one of the problems with using aluminum to build your ships out of and then sending them to where there's a lot of sun is that this can make the alloying metals in the aluminum alloy migrate to the grain boundaries of the metal, and promote inter-granular corrosion, apparently in spite of paint and other coatings used. The way you would usually fix this would be to stick your chunk of metal in a furnace and heat it up to a certain point, but there aren't any ship-sized furnaces, so there was a program around 2010 to try and come up with a way to fix this in-situ somehow. I have no idea where, if anywhere, that program went, but I'm pretty pessimistic about it.
 

The Whispering Monk

Well-known member
Osaul
I know one of the problems with using aluminum to build your ships out of and then sending them to where there's a lot of sun is that this can make the alloying metals in the aluminum alloy migrate to the grain boundaries of the metal, and promote inter-granular corrosion, apparently in spite of paint and other coatings used. The way you would usually fix this would be to stick your chunk of metal in a furnace and heat it up to a certain point, but there aren't any ship-sized furnaces, so there was a program around 2010 to try and come up with a way to fix this in-situ somehow. I have no idea where, if anywhere, that program went, but I'm pretty pessimistic about it.
We need melta-guns!
 

Captain X

Well-known member
Osaul
Unfortunately, the Navy seemed rather married to the idea that these ships be all aluminum in order to make them lighter so they could operate in shallow water. This is also why one of the two designs had a tri-hull design. I have to admit, I was rather skeptical of the concept, as well as the idea of parts of the ships being modular, such that mission-specific modules could be swapped out depending on what the mission was, thus making the ships "multi-role." The thing is, it would be difficult to find a way to make this something easily done (they wanted something that could be done pier-side in less than a day), but still strong enough to have it not end up flopping around in the ship during rough weather. Which is why I wasn't surprised to learn they ended up just picking a module and permanently mounting them, thus sacrificing the "multi-role" aspect of the design just so they could get at least some use out of these little ships.
 

Captain X

Well-known member
Osaul
We need melta-guns!
The thing I saw was basically a big flat plate with two handles, connected by cables to some power source, which heated that puppy to over 500 degrees in an effort to "de-sensitize" the alloy under it. The thing is, you would have to hold it there for a while, which would be pretty difficult to do by hand, and even if it worked, you'd have this zone around the particular patch you just did which would have had a partial heat effect applied to it, basically making it impossible to actually do since you'd probably end up heat-sensitizing portions of the hull you'd already heat treated. Also, the design of the thing made it seem like horrific burns of either the operator or anyone within arms reach were definitely in the future of that tool. So basically the only realistic solution to this particular problem would be to strip the ships of anything melty and to construct ship-sized furnaces to treat the whole ship, at least as far as I saw it. Or really, just to accept that your ships were going to have a much shorter lifespan than you'd hope, and retire them early, which is exactly what they ended up doing.

They were kind of neat-looking, though, especially the tri-hull.
 

Bacle

When the effort is no longer profitable...
Founder


Final report on the grounding of the USS Connecticut. Turns out the crew were having repeated issues with proper navigation and sounding training/actions, and this was not the first time the crew hit something they shouldn't have.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Top