Comments by "Abraham Dozer" (@abrahamdozer6273) on "Drachinifel" channel.

  1. " Whats the difference between naval and merchant spec construction? " Modern warships incorporate the so called "gas tight citadel" in which the atmosphere and environment within a substantial portion of the ship can be sealed off and controlled for nuclear, chemical and biological defence. You wouldn't bother incorporating such a feature in a commercial vessel. Maybe, cruise ships have climate controlled areas but they are nothing like the sealed and filtered atmosphere in a gas tight citadel.
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  2. ‌"If guns on ships(of whichever size) were able to be elevated to a negative angle, would it be possible to use them to shoot torpedoes out of the water?" Projectiles change course when they enter the water and their trajectory is not very predictable (see: Refraction in general). When the incident angle to the surface gets shallow enough (for either photons or cannon balls), refraction becomes reflection.I remember skipping .22 bullets off the top of the pond on my Grandfather's farm to hit a target on the other side. Unless the angle is quite steep. your cannon shot does the same thing. The Royal Navy got quite good at that during the oaken hull period.
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  3. "Was the High Seas Fleet offered passage to Canada?" The only logical place in Canada to sail a fleet like that would be into the huge natural harbour with naval base of Halifax. In 1918, that city was a ruin after having suffered the biggest man-made, non-nuclear explosion in world history only months before and the infrastructure to handle fleet that size was gone.
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  4. "What would be the effect of having gas turbine technology installed in Royal Navy Ships during World War II?" Gas turbines burn a higher petroleum fraction like diesel or stove oil, kerosene, etc. Steam boilers burn the crappy sludge at the bottom of the fractionating tank (and there is a lot of it). Britain wouldn't have been able to supply enough fuel to the Royal Navy without stealing it from the Army.
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  5. Also, one navy's Destroyer Escort was another navy's Frigate that said Destroyer Escort was modeled after.
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  6. "Why did the River class use triple expansion engines if they were built in 1941? Weren't those outdated by WW1? " Steam turbine production required high skill levels that were anything but widespread. Reciprocating steam engines had been produced all over the place for more than a century and good production techniques were widely known. Any factory or engine shop that cold produce large railroad steam locomotives could all make marine reciprocating steam and they did all over.
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  7. Brunel was an authentic genius.
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  8. "Reactions to the sinking of the Mary Rose and Vasa?" Henry Tudor : "O shytte!" Gustavus Adolphus : "Ah skit!"
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  9. "HTP powered U-Boats" see: Royal Navy experimental submarine HMS Explorer a.k.a. "HMS Exploder". Word is that you could always spot her crew on the streets because none of them had eyebrows.
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  10. Who'd have thought that there would be another significant naval battle fought there near the end of the 20th century. It's stranger than fiction.
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  11. Considering how many U-Boats were built and how successful they were, the "toilet" issue may have been a maintenance problem and generally the engineering was awesome.
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  12. BTW, The Franklin Expedition (cannibalism and all) .... our newest Arctic ice breaking warship just sailed right through the strait where Franklin came acropper about a month ago.
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  13. "How did steam ships manage to get out of port quickly in emergency situations?" Cold steel to full steam pressure (oil and probably coal too) takes about four hours. Cold steel to full power using a gas turbine: 90 seconds.
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  14. She now has a welded 3/4" thick hull rather than a 3/8" riveted one. There is an American Fletcher Class destroyer named "The Sullivans" just over the border in Buffalo NY that had her 1/4" hull rust through and fail about a year and a half ago. She sank at her moorings and that made a very big mess of her insides. The Fletchers were light, fast and cheap to build, hence the thin skin. As the Haida is no longer required to make 34 knots, 3/4" steel isn't such a bad idea for a ship just sitting there.
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  15. "How exactly would a navy go about selling used warships?" At the end of WWII, the Royal Canadian Navy demobilized faster than the Kriegsmarine. A small population with a resultant small tax base could not have maintained such a huge navy without a good reason. Hundreds of Trans-Atlantic escort vessels that had no utility in the conflict with Japan were laid up as soon as they returned from their last convoy and turned over to Crown Assets Disposal. All sorts of Third World Navies (primarily in Latin America) ended up with squadrons of used Canadian Corvettes. One of the weirdest cases were a group of Canadian Castle Class Corvettes that made it into service with Chang Kai-Shek's Nationalist Chinese Navy. These were all captured and folded into Mao's navy and they served in the People's Liberation Army Navy until the early 1970's which forewarned Canada to not sell used warships to anyone, anymore (see: ex-RN ships in Argentinian Armada service). Now they either scrap them or sink them as dive wrecks/artificial reefs. By far, the most interesting sale was of the Montreal-built River Class Frigate HMCS Stormont to Aristotle Onassis who turned her into his luxury yacht Christina O. She still plies the Med (minus her steam power plant and Hedgehog projector).
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  16. "How did watch standing evolve over time from the age of sail to the modern era?" The two, 2 hour "Dog Watches" suggest a more recent origin as they allow the on-duty crew to eat. This was likely not a consideration during the age of sail when rations were largely preserved (and weavilly) this-and-that. I might be wrong but the Dog Watches sound like a more modern addition. If you are on the "Middle Watch (Midnight to 04:00) it is customary to wake your relief at 03:50 with the end of a broom handle , lest a balled fist reaches you.
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  17. Fun fact: 834 Curtiss Helldivers were built at Canadian Car and Foundry at (what is now) Thunder Bay, Ontario for the US Navy. Canada never flew those and they were all for export. The factory was literally at the end of the line, at the edge of the vast Boreal Forest in a safe, wartime factory location.
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  18. "SMS Emden's impact on the 'big picture'" I have a four inch knife made out of the steel and a bit of brass salvaged from
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  19. "What were small improvements/changes in ship design, that made a (relative) huge difference in handling/fighting capability/life quality of the crew?" Here's a couple of less obvious ones: Switching crew messing from having them sling hammocks wherever over whatever, literally cheek-to-cheek with little space between them to quartering the crew in dedicated mess spaces equipped with proper bunks ("Racks"). Watch changes are much easier, the crews are healthier and less likely to get sick and you don't have to pitch your mates out of their slumber to do whatever else the space they are messing in was designed to be used for. The Royal Navy was the last one to figure that out (something to do with their class system). Another was enclosing more and more deck space so that the crew could get about the ship in rough seas without getting wet, overboard, smashed into something hard ...Example: the extended forcastles added to the Flower Class Corvettes in WWII that made them far more effective escorts because they beat the crap out of their crews to a considerably degree
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  20. Icing on the upper works, masts, antennae, etc. was a great safety hazard as they became so top heavy that they were in danger of foundering from time to time on the North Atlantic. The generation of destroyers that Canada built to replace those ships looked like worn bars of soap and they shed ice (and nuclear fall out) because of their shape.
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  21. Hey now. Be nice. One of the great Naval triumphs of WWII was performed by HMS Campbeltown (ex USS Buchanan) when she was repurposed as a bomb ship that blew up the battleship-sized dry dock in St. Nazaire. She was by far and away the most effective "four stacker" of the war. BOOM!
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  22.  @brentm9848  They'd have anchored them in the Bedford Basin, I suppose. It would have been many years before it was "business as usual" in Halifax. By the way, I've slept over the very spot where that explosion took place ... right off of Jetty 5, right near where the MacDonald bridge now stands. I didn't know it at the time but there was a stinking great crater underneath our keel.
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  23.  @silentotto5099  They were already building aircraft there ... Hurricanes for the RCAF and RAF among others (10% of all Hurricanes Built). This was a well established factory complex that made railroad cars, locomotives and ships. They were a busy operation that turned out Convoy Escorts as well as a whole range of armaments. Don't forget that Canada had already been at war for 2-1/4 years when Pearl Harbour was bombed and war production was already in full swing in Canada. As I said, the railroads and Great Lakes freighter production was already therefor decades before they got into aircraft production.The Helldivers were just another contract to bid on. It sounds as if they built them well, too. Some manufacturing was located in the "hinterlands" intentionally, though. A good example is the Canadian Aluminum industry that was built up in Kitimat BC and Arvida Quebec partly for their strategically safe locations and the proximity to cheap hydroelectricity. (This is the aluminum industry that Trump went after as some up-start that was setup to steal American jobs, despite is having been there for nearly a century). I live in a town on Lake Ontario called Oakville which had a Flower Class Corvette named after them. HMCS Oakville was constructed by the competing Port Arthur Shipbuilding Company. HMCS Oakville went on to later fame when she sank U-94 in Guantanamo Bay while escorting a convoy up the Eastern US Coast. It is a fascinating action (do Google) which included Oakville's crew fighting it out with the Germans on the dock of the U-Boat as they tried to capture it intact. It's like something from the Napoleonic Wars.
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  24.  @silentotto5099  Canada had to build all of that and process the raw materials, too. Except for some lend-lease finished goods, the rest was off-limits to Canada because of the Neutrality act. Canada spent 10 years two months at war with Germany during the 20th Century while the US spent 5 years 4 months at the same. That and the railways is why Canada became an industrial nation. Bombardier still builds train cars there at that plant location. Most Americans get zero Canadian history, especially Canadian Military history. That's just the way it is.
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  25.  @gregorywright4918  The Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton, Ontario is a MUST. The Canadian War Museum in Ottawa is too as well as the Canadian Aeronautical and Space Museum. again in Ottawa. If you want to learn about earlier conflicts, try Fort Henry in Kingston Ontario. There are battlefield sites all over the Niagara Peninsula. Fort Erie (near Buffalo) is good. Fort George right across the river from Ft. Niagara is too but try to hit it when an event is going on there. Not a lot of Canadian warships were preserved but a couple of Cold War submarines were and they are very interesting. One, HMCS Ojibwa is at Port Burwell on Lake Erie within reach of the US border. The biggest battlefield memorial by far for the Canadians ... you could call it Canada's Gettysburg battlefield isn't even in North America. It is in France on the Plain of Douai at Vimy Ridge. It is the highest ground in the area around Arras and the Western Front went right over it's spine. The French and Brritish lostsufferedd 150,000 casualties over two and a half years fighting trying to take the ridge and the 100,000 man Canadian Corps took it in a matter of hours against Bavarians and Prussians. The Canadians took it on the day that the Americans joined the war and you can be sure that the German General Staff would have been spooked to look at a map, see where Canada and America was with the prospect of millions more troops like them. The Canadian and American armies were very different and it wasn't like that in the end but it must have been sobering for them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMJ_yjchLrc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9Ab4Crf7cU
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  26.  @HighlanderNorth1  I was on the last surviving one in May. It's in Halifax.
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  27.  @seasirocco3063  Two River Class Frigates, built at Canadian Vickers in Montreal were delivered to the US Navy where they were "reverse engineered" to provide the template for the American Tacoma Class Destroyer Escort. No American would ever know that.
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  28. There's a big-ass Canadian navy ship just launched and named after your cousin Harry that circumnavigated North America a couple of summers ago.
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  29.  @richardmalcolm1457  The "Healy"? That's a Yank Coast Guard ship that sails in Canadian waters with the permission of the Canadians.The Canadian Coast Guard sails those straits every year (has had to rescue Healy at least once)but for the the first time since the 1950s, the Royal Canadian Navy has returned to those waters with a fleet of six 5000 ton dedicated armed ice breaking ships that will guard sovereign Canadian waters from unauthorized intrusions by vessels such as Healy. I was referring to the HMCS Harry deWolf which is currently circumnavigating North America.
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  30. The name HMCS Ontario lives on as a Sea Cadet training establishment run out of the Royal Military College in Kingston every year.
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  31. The Hydra was a breakthrough design for crew comfort as Hydras have nine heads.
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  32. The current generation of Canadian Frigates was built with "twenty year steel" and a lot of it is being hastily replaced as hulls of the ships of that busy, little fleet are "oil canning".
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  33.  @jefferyindorf699  On the Murmansk run, the RN escort carriers also carried interceptor type aircraft such as Seafires as they were under fairly constant air attack in the North Sea.
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  34.  @allangibson2408  Heavy on the "once through" ... Gas turbines are certainly not efficient but they are the preferred "go to" propulsion when the C.O wants to go water skiing.
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  35.  @mikemullen5563  Geared turbines didn't change much after that ... an extra pressure stage, perhaps. I can see his point. A sudden shock load would do a long list of damage.
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  36. That was the best use made of a Lend Lease American four stacker destroyer during the whole war. The other 49 ranged from dismal to completely useless. Those MGBs/MTBs and Fairmiiles all had aviation engines and burned high octane petrol They were bomb ships on their own.
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  37.  @WALTERBROADDUS  They were only just starting to. Diesel development sped up because of the war but it really wasn't "there" yet. Besides, the triple expansion steam was tried, true and reliable. There was no need or reason to be screwing around with "littoral like" experiments during a dire emergency. That's a peacetime luxury.
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  38. Scuttling your ship and putting her crew at the mercy of the Japanese was an extreme measure. I understand it went badly for the survivors. It's too bad that th RN isn't honouring the name by giving it to one of the new Type 26 "super frigates" that are under construction. Perhaps They were meaning to before the order for the ships was truncated down to 8 hulls.
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  39.  @shaun1293  That's too thin. There must have been all sorts of failures. Imagine hitting a "bergy bit" out in the North Atlantic when your hull is already brittle with the cold?
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  40.  @archibaldlarid3587  I have done the very thing that you mention on both naval vessels and sailboats in long distance races. I can remember hallucinating on a sailboat in the wee hours where everything is dark and weird. The only saving grace is that I knew I was hallucinating and told myself "I'm definitely hallucinating". Engine Room watchkeeping is easier in that you are regularly checking, recording the state of the machinery in brightly lit spaces. As you imply, watch keeping at sea is brutal, sometimes. When you get cold, wet and start popping glucose and caffeine pills, stuff happens to you. The Dog watches are 16:00-18:00 and 18:00-20:00 and you may or may not turn in at that time. The chronically sea sick go straight to their racks as soon as their watch ends (eating soda crackers if they're lucky enough to keep them down)..
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  41.  @stevewindisch7400  You can see why our marriner ancestors were so superstitious. Imagine having an experience like that 60 feet up in the rigging. Yikes!
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  42.  @thekinginyellow1744  Located at the tip of South America which was a really big strategic deal before the completion of the Panama Canal. Diego Garcia (British at the time) was part of my father's Coastal Command patrol area during WWII It was a backwater because the Japanese were not successful in the Indian Ocean. It could have had major importance back then.
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  43. It's a good thing that you cut your analysis off at WWII era ships. The LCS is a candidate for that list, too.
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  44.  @sarjim4381  The crews are getting smaller and automation and technology areis becoming more compact. That allows the luxury of devoting space to the crews. Time was when every single valve, switch, lever was turned by hand and you needed to cram three watches worth of manual laborers into your ship. I served for a small bit on some small ships build in the early 1950s and we literally lived like submariners . We were stacked four high in steel racks, always grubby with oil as there was no chance of bathing. Even the water always tasted like diesel.The big advantage over submarines, though is that you could go up on deck pretty much any time when off watch ... within reason. I'd go stark, raving mad in a submarine. I've been on them and they close in around you after a few hours. We had salt tablet dispensers in the engine room but we mostly sailed in sub-Arctic conditions.
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  45. One of my uncles was a school teacher before he joined the RCAF during the early stages of WWII when the US was neutral American boys were coming up to enlist but they didn't "have" Trigonometry as it wasn't a compulsory requirement in the US school system. You had to have graduated high school in Canada to be air crew and Trig was compulsory. He began his war training up American boys so that they could navigate (He finished the war in command of a base!) ... not navy, I know but I was ....
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  46.  @JeepWrangler1957  On the earlier versions before they extended the forecastle, you had do go outside onto an exposed well deck to get your hot meal from the galley. In very heavy weather, you wouldn't have wanted a meal anyway. They dusted off old foods like hardtack on these little mid-ocean escorts.
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  47.  @brunoethier896  No, I'm from way back. Good job on Asterix, btw. The only downside is that they didn't build Obelix.
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  48.  @brunoethier896  ... crooked politics. The RCN is dangerously behind in replacing her fleet. There are three shipyards in Canada capable of building sophisticated warships. Two of them are building and Davie is watching because they are not in a Liberal riding. For shame!...
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  49.  @rediband  The bronze screws ... They're on the ground right beside the gangway. You can glimpse them now and again in some of the frames.
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  50. When the destroyer HMCS Assiniboine sank U-210 in a prolonged point blank battle, the vessels became so close that some ratings working in the galley and desperately wanting to join the action were throwing empty Coca-Cola bottle at the bridge of the U-boat. It seems that the "Greyhound" story (movie and book) was based on a mash-up of two RCN engagements ... this one and Oakville's.
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