Comments by "COL BEAUSABRE" (@colbeausabre8842) on "USS Bainbridge - Guide 283" video.

  1. They might have been cute, but they were hell to live on. So much so that RN's destroyermen were paid "hard lying money" to recompence them. "Hard Lying or Hard Lying Money, is a term applied to a special allowance granted by the Royal Navy, to men serving in small craft, such as destroyers, torpedo-boats, trawlers etc, to compensate for the relative discomforts of small-ship service."
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  2.  @westcoaststacker569  IIRC, the US Army purchased a couple of the Wickes class banana boat conversions to try to serve as blockade runners to the Philippines in the early days of WW2.
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  3. She was totally disarmed and used because of her speed
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  4. The Alfonso Afonso de Albuquerque class colonial sloops were fine ships and worthy of consideration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRP_Afonso_de_Albuquerque_(1934)
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  5. Like the RN, the USN just specified a set of characteristics and let each yard build destroyers to their own design, This explains the differences between ships nominally of the same class
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  6. The Bainbridge was built as a Frigate - which was the USN 's and French Navy's term for a ship larger than a destroyer and smaller than a cruiser, designed as a fleet escort. Rated a DLGN, she was the world's first nuclear powered destroyer type. The DLG's were re-rated as CG's when Congress got concerned over a "cruiser gap" with the Russians. So the USN just rerated all its DLG's and DLGN's (and some of it's larger DDG's) as CG's or CGN's. Hey, presto! Problem solved Mr Congressman.
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  7. You're comparing apples and oranges. Gun size - 6 pounders (57mm) were heavier than almost anything on torpedo boats - if destroyers took on cruisers or battlewagons, they used their torpedoes. Speed - this was a time when a battleship strained to reach 18 knots (Illinois class - 17 knots, Maine class - 18 knots) cruisers to reach 20 (Columbia class - designed to chase down fast ocean liners could do 23, most of the USN could do 18 or so, the Denver class, a few years after the Bainbridge class, was good for 17). And wouldn't one expect some progress two decades later
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  8. Maybe that's what the Limeys call 'em. In God's Country, they're known as Banan Boats
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  9. "I wonder what the turtle deck was used for?" For the turtles, of course.
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  10. Torpedoes were expensive and were regarded as "sniper" weapons. Look at the limited number of fish aboard the RN's Great War tin cans (4 in the L through V class). It wasn't until late in the war that they adopted what they called "browning", where rather than aiming a torpedo at a particular ship, you fired a spread at the enemy battle line. Looking the RN's mid WW1 fighting instructions "Even when attacking from a favorable position, both gunfire from the target and the trying conditions on a fast-moving destroyer made both accurate estimation of target course and speed and precise torpedo aiming problematic. Furthermore, the target might well alter course as soon as the attacker fired, thereby invalidating whatever settings were on the Torpedo Director. Thus by 1916, the Royal Navy’s view was that: "a hit … on the ship aimed at with a single torpedo at long range … can only be regarded as a fluke …. Under normal conditions a single ship should not be fired at from ranges outside 1,500 yards." However, fortunately for the effectiveness of the torpedo as a weapon: "The use to which the torpedo will most often be put in daylight is that of browning a line of ships, the object being to make the torpedoes cross their tracks between the bows of the first and the stern of the last ship of that part of the line taken as the target.""
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  11. OK, what would you have built, given the technology of the time? Compare them to the contemporary RN "Thirty Knotters" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_destroyer_classes#Torpedo_Boat_Destroyers
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  12. My dad taught Chemistry (He had a BS in Chemical Engineering) after WW2 at the Naval Academy Prep School when it was located at Bainbridge while awaiting his discharge from the Navy
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  13. In the RN, you got Hard Lying Money for serving in their contemporaries "Hard Lying or Hard Lying Money, is a term applied to a special allowance granted by the Royal Navy, to men serving in small craft, such as destroyers, torpedo-boats, trawlers etc, to compensate for the relative discomforts of small-ship service."
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