Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "The Drydock - Episode 304 (Part 2)" video.

  1. wrt saving/extending the life, of Titanic. Given the sort of damage she is assumed to have suffered: hull plates stove in and seams opened. the best measure would be collision mats. Lacking that, I wonder how many large tarpaulins and hatch covers were in ship's stores, that potentially could be combined to make a facsimile of a collision mat? Apparently, if the leaks could have been stemmed in two compartments, the ship could have stayed afloat.
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  2. wrt making Wasp more survivable. I don't think trying to use the same torpedo and AA protection tonnage allowance as the Lexingtons would be viable, because, iirc, the tonnage added for those systems was counted in the displacement of the ship, and that additional tonnage was not available when Wasp was built. The best thing that could have been done with Wasp was to route all the gasoline mains outside of the hull. A lesson learned from the loss of Lexington was, when an inbound attack is detected, drain the gas mains and fill the mains and pump rooms with CO2. When Yorktown and Hornet were lost, they did not burn. That was not possible with Wasp, as she was actively operating aircraft at the time, and hit without enough warning. A running modification that was being made on carriers, as they came in for refit, was to reroute the gas mains outside the hull. Wasp was in Norfolk for some work at the beginning of June, before deploying to the Pacific. The material I have access to this morning does not say if the gas main modification was done on Wasp. Late war photos of Enterprise show what I believe to be that external gas main, running horizontally down the starboard side, just below the hangar. There are a couple photos of Wasp, taken in Norfolk. in June 42, that do not show a similar pipe system.
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