Comments by "Adam Bainbridge" (@AdamMGTF) on "The Drydock - Episode 100" video.

At a car show a couple of years ago I heard a conversation about my rover 25 shed (skyline was off the road). Anyway the car looked like a old mans gold rover but had a 280hp engine swap. Point being. The lad said “cool Q car” and his mate said “yeh like James Bond”.... like a true rover owner, I put my thinking pipe in my mouth and explained some history! They must have been mightily bored
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Myself and BK had a debate about battleships and their ‘obsolescence’ the other day. Good timing! We were on a slightly differenttopic. But still!
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Q&A question. Do you know of any time where sailors traditional superstitions, changed the course of history or heavily impacted an event? And (if you fancy) what’s your favourite or most absurd superstition you’ve come across.
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Connor McLernon this was answered in a previous dry dock. There was once an elephant on a RN ship!
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HypertronDE the simple answer is they were blockaded. Remember the grand fleet was based in Scapa flow for a reason. There was also large mine fields. The reality was that getting out of the North Sea would have been very very difficult. Getting back to Germany would be next to impossible. Good question mind!
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CydrosElite the range of subs increased massively I think :)
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Christopher Babilon I don’t remember that being in a DD. Mind you simple answer would be the amount of effort needed to fit such buldges to the huge number of cargo ships used in both wars. Look how small a liberty ship is compared to a modern bulk carrier. Plus there was basically no capacity as all the ship yards were building as quick as they could and fixing damaged ships. Bringing ships in for refit at that scale wasn’t possible. I do wonder why Liberty ships etal weren’t designed with some sort of protection. This is why we have drach lol
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Matthew Ovens the Japanese went to huge lengths to keep them secret. Even now, photographs of the ships are incredibly rare. The other world powers didn’t find out through espionage as the specs of the ships were such well kept secrets. As for noticing.... do you mean as in you look at the ship and can tell the guns are bigger? If so you’d have to work out how that could be achieved.... recon plane. Submarine. Neither would have the ability to notice a 50mm difference in size on something so large. Remember at this time, it wasn’t uncommon for battleships and cruisers to be confused by the other side (when in a gun dual no less) and the difference in gun size between a 8inch cruiser and a 15inch battleship is a lot more than the variance between 16&18 inch battleship guns :)
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TraditionalAnglican not really the point of a Q car. A Q car is something that looks slow and just blends in with many like it. But underneath has been heavily modified to be very fast. That’s where the name comes from. The car like the Q ship is a warrior in a sheep’s skin. Where as something like a Tesla model S or Johns Dodge, is a fast ship, but still a ship. Built and used as intended. So an example. My rover weighed about 700kg. It had no interior and was carefully lightened and had 2 and a half times the power it left the factory with. It was and looked like a neglected car which most scrap yards would reject 😅. Yet when I went drag racing and blew away 300hp 4wd Subaru’s. It was a huge shock. If the same Subaru was blown away by a Porsche 911 it would just be the expected result. U boats saw a war ship (Porsche) and they got what they expected. If the saw a normal merchantman with no weapons (a normal rover25) then they got what they expected. If the came across a normal merchantman which then dropped its gun shields and began blazing away. They had found my rover25 and thus a Q ship (or qcar) Hope that makes sense
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John Shepherd as above. No idea how to tag multiple people. Imagine blowing away brand new M5s in a standard looking rover 75 (look them up if you havent seen one. They are a boring barge that rover sold until the company collapsed. Probably one of the most boring every day cars in England). They did however at some point for some reason do one with an American v8. Which was played with by rover and sold to the public. A friend of mine had one he had running around 600hp. The car weighed about 2/3s of what a m5 did at the time. It was bloody hallairous. He actually went to the effort of taking off the big wheels the car came with (replaced with smaller wheels but super sticky tyres), painting the big brakes black with bits of brown to make them look like old mono blocks. And taking off any of the “sporty” trim to make it look like a normal 1.8l run around. The final addition of a exhaust which ran through 7 baffles to a single exit (made to look tiny) with a switchable valve in the middle of the car for when he wanted to hear the engine. That was the crown jewel on the best Q car I’ve ever seen. It genuinely looked like a second hand taxi but could put most super cars to shame! I often wonder what happend to it
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