Comments by "Doug JB" (@dougjb7848) on "The Drydock - Episode 244" video.

My grandfather was born in 1922. By his last year of high school he was about 6’, maybe 6’1”. In photos of his football team and Drum Corps that he was part of, he’s taller by inches than anybody else. By time he finished Marine Corp boot camp he was 6’2”, weighed 200-210, and was enormous compared to the vast majority of his peers. His best friend throughout his life was 6’4”, maybe a shade over, and he may have invented the concept of photo-bombing, being very good at noticing folks nearby who were about to take a picture and leaning ever … so … slightly toward them.
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To clarify, the vessel is not sinking, rather it’s demonstrating A) the scale of a high Sea State B) how poorly this class of ship fared against such — the Scharns were notorious for having A, and sometimes B turret as well, put out of action by ingress of sea water.
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What? Per CDC, US male average height 2022 was 5’9.” Females 5’4.”
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Morning coffee, the spring breeze, and a Drydock. Aaaahhhh.
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32:18 USS Porter: what? We don’t want to hit a friendly ship? Ummm …. I gotta make a radio call.
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Define “in WW1/2 era.” The USN completed and commissioned ships during the closing months of WW2 that were on-track to active deployment when hostilities ended. Example is the Baltimore class. Of the seventeen ships completed (including three built to the modified Oregon City spec ), twelve were commissioned before the Japanese capitulation on September 2, 1945, but only seven took part in the battles of the Pacific Theater and one in the European Theater. The remainder were still working up when the war ended.
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@chancellordavid7332 Unless it directly struck a vulnerable system, I’d think very little. A) a lightning strike will seek the path of least resistance to ground. In a building, this is facilitated by dedicated grounds wires that are connected to a lighting rod(s) at the highest point of the building. Similarly, ships are constructed with equipment to help conduct a lightning strike away from sensitive equipment and to-ground. These provide paths away / around sensitive areas and more directly to-ground. The voltage would be encouraged to follow these rather than wandering the ship’s structure. B) all the sensitive equipment is separately grounded and protected by overload cutouts; in the event of a strike, power may be briefly interrupted but, after the .05 seconds it takes for the voltage of the strike to discharge to ground, it will restore.
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18:15 Do you consider multiple weeks of shore bombardment during Operation Torch, Husky, Anvilan and Dragoon as “secondary duty?”
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Bismarck was not a Treaty battleship.
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8:58 USS Los Angeles, I believe.
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@Concealed1911 Depends on definition of “hearing.” If you’re aboard ship, unless you’re in the boiler or turbine machinery spaces or immediately adjacent, you likely wouldn’t “hear their sound,” as much as feel their vibration through the ship structure. Sailors pretty quickly acclimate to this, and can estimate how quickly the ship is moving by it, and if it stops completely unannounced they know something likely is wrong. Underwater is a different story. Depending on water and equipment quality, passive sonar systems can hear surface ships from dozens of nautical miles away. But what they hear is not always “the ship’s machinery;” it may instead be the ship’s screws turning (and good systems can determine ship speed by counting RPM if the screws), or the disturbance of hull through water, etc.
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@Concealed1911 Absolutely! Even within the machinery spaces, under normal conditions a boiler-and-turbine propulsion system produces a lot of what we might call “white noise” similar to what one would hear standing one foot off a busy high speed thoroughfare (which I’d posit is far more dangerous than a ship’s machinery spaces). You may need to speak up and deliberately enunciate, but will still be easily heard. A nuclear powered ship is even quieter. There’re not nearly as many moving parts to make noise, but more importantly, nearly all of the the stuff that makes noise also makes radiation, and we very much want the radiation to stay in its assigned space, so all that stuff is contained within quite a lot of stuff that blocks / absorbs both. On the deck, likely the ambient atmosphere will be louder than anything the ship does. Anywhere in the superstructure, it would like an office block with its HVAC fan system running hard. You’ll feel its sound, but little of it is in the range of human speech, so, carry on with normal programming.
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@nathand.9969 Bismarck was barely even “Treaty Era.” Yes, her keel was laid just after second London was signed, but by that time the signatories of that Treaty were already fairly certain it wouldn’t really be followed, and everyone was drafting plans and sharpening their slide rules for post-Treaty ships.
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38:20 “Night fighting?” Doesn’t sound cricket, old chap. Best leave it to the colonials and such. You see, the blighters have no choice but to strike under cover of night, as they know they cannot compete in daylight.
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