Comments by "Dave Sisson" (@Dave_Sisson) on "Drachinifel" channel.

  1. Before WW2 they were all foreign (mostly British) designs. In the war smaller ships were locally designed like the Bathurst class corvettes. For the past 60 years they have adapted and changed foreign designs to their own purposes like the Colllins class submarines, ANZAC class frigates, air warfare destroyers and the two ships that they are not allowed to call aircraft carriers because they don't want to upset the Chinese.
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  2. No, they'd remake his stuff to entirely feature 'Murican ships and they'd redub it with an All American accent.
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  3. I agree that the conflict has an inappropriate name. Personally I call it "The American Mutiny".
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  4. It would be nice if you could cover the tradition of submarines flying the Jolly Rodger on their return to port after sinking a ship. When did this begin and was it restricted to the Royal Navy or did other navies do it too? What did the various markings on the flags mean? Thanks.
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  5. Fair point, but you have to remember that the Swordfish, one of the "garbage" carrier aircraft sunk more Axis tonnage than any other type of plane. So a very solid and sturdy aircraft was more effective than the fast and flash aircraft that the Brits and the Yanks built to succeed it.
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  6. The South American countries were more or less broke by then and Commonwealth countries like Australia and Canada had their ships included in Britain's naval treaty quotas. That doesn't leave many potential buyers.
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  7. All the Australian Tribal Class destroyers in the Second World War were locally built. The same applies to Canadian Tribals, they also built their own.
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  8. The new Zealand navy currently conisits of two elderly frigates that the Australians built for them at a discount in the 1990s and there is a ban on visits by any nuclear powered or armed ships to anywhere in the country. Essentially NZ has totally given up on their navy.
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  9.  @milamber319  That is due to the slow evolution of "independence" amongst the colonies, starting with "Responsible Government" in the 1850s. I think I recall a constitutional law professor saying that a separate Crown of Australia only came into existence as late as the 1940s
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  10.  @chrislong3938  I specialise in mountain history, I've even won a few awards, but I can't write fiction or any dialogue, I don't have the imagination or flair for that sort of thing. So if anyone wants to use that idea, they are free to do so.
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  11. These days, no one will fund a big budget war movie unless "Murica is involved. So I doubt it would ever be made unless they change the facts and have a large component of the U.S. Navy present.
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  12. Gross Tonnage refers to the enclosed volume of a ship and is mostly used for passenger ships and ferries. Displacement is used for cargo ships and warships. A ship's Gross Tonnage is usually a much higher number than its Displacement tonnage.
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  13. As Drach said these things vary by country. Australian government copyright lasts 50 years, corporate copyright lasts 70 years and personal copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years.
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  14. Powell and Pressburger seem to have had a mission to make every genre of films, from rom-coms to thrillers and everything in between, unlike contemporizes such as Hitchcock who churned out endless films in the same genre. And it worked for them, 80% of Powell and Pressburger films still hold up as good films today.
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  15. Two different eras had V class destroyers, there were a lot of great names: Vendetta, Vengeance, Vampire, Vigilant, Vixen, Valkyrie, etc.
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  16. HMS Hood was many times the size of HMAS Sydney, with much better armour and its guns were 15 inch rather than 6 inch. Kormoran's co-destruction with Sydney was a fluke, but against the Hood, Kormoran would have been blasted into a million bits while barely scratching Hood's paint.
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  17. Some countries have a sort of combined online archives with all important museums, libraries, galleries and archives contributing. For example https://trove.nla.gov.au does that for Australia and most photos, newspaper articles, etc. that they hold can be found on the one site.If the UK has something similar, it shouldn't be hard to find a library or museum that will upload Drach's photos. Alternately if he wants a dedicated website, I run a website for historical articles called australianmountains.com and I'd be happy to set up a new ultra simple to use website for Drach's pics which would allow him to upload and easily arrange galleries of photos at no charge ever, or he could do it himself for about 100 quid annually using a website builder like Squarespace, Wix or Godaddy, etc.
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  18. Nostalgia?
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  19. Well the British did conquer territory in France and India, but many other countries were involved as well, it was fought on four continents, so the American name isn't really accurate, a better name might be the Real first world war,
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  20.  @hanzzel6086  My understanding is that the Azores were discovered by Portugal and remained their property except for the few decades when Spain owned Portugal.
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  21. The Cruel Sea is another excellent film on that subject.
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  22.  @ccalthrop6347  Where there has only been one monarch of that name, they don't get a number. e.g. Queen Victoria and Anne, King Stephen and John. If we get another monarch of that name, they retrospectively get "the first" added to their name. So the Tudor monarch was just known as Queen Elizabeth until 1952 when another Queen Elizabeth came to the throne. Then she was 'renamed'' Elizabeth I.
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  23. Yes and visiting the Vasa is a brilliant experience, it is largely intact and the museum built around it is also very good. By contrast the Mary Rose in Portsmouth only survives in fragments and the experience was nowhere as good as seeing Vasa in Stockholm.
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  24. If the straits had been forced, I rather like the idea of sending the Australians to fight against the Austro-Hungarians in Ukraine. Unlike the stalemated Western Front, that area had a fast moving front line and the Australian light cavalry would have been much more useful than they were dismounted at Gallipoli.
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  25. Rubbish, I live in a city of 5 million people that was founded by a person called Batman. So the first ASDIC operator was NOT the original Batman.
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  26. Interesting, but move forward a couple of decades and the U.S. was much more reluctant to offload its colonies than the U.K. was. The Brits put a lot of effort into preparing their colonies ready for independence and once they had a competent local bureaucratic and political class, they granted them independence as fast as possible. They were visibly unhappy when Bermuda voted against independence twice. By contrast the Yanks held onto everything for as long as possible. With the notable exception of the Philippines they have kept almost all their colonies to this day except for a few places in Micronesia which got quasi-independence and Hawaii which was annexed into USA proper. So if America had got all the British possessions in the West Indies, I wonder if even the bigger islands like Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago would be independent or if they would all remain American colonies like Guam, American Samoa, etc. That would make the Caribbean an American lake and Cuba would be even more nervous.
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  27. After 1000 years of war between the English and the French, when this book was published in 1898 there was an understandable suspicion of the French amongst English people of the time.
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  28.  @genericpersonx333  I generally agree, but even without Japan, the Australians owned a full sized battlecruiser plus several cruisers, so combined with British units based in Ceylon and Singapore, it's likely they could have eliminated any German presence in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
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  29. For 30 years the Blue Riband has been held by fast catamaran ferries made by companies like Incat and Austal that can travel at over 40 knots for sustained periods. While they're not traditional liners, they are passenger ships and some of them are quite large, they be up to 12,000 Gross Tons. So nuclear subs are not the fastest ships.
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  30. I suspect the house Lowery was in was vacuumed at least 8 times over during that interview. It must be the cleanest house on the planet.
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  31. It's important to remember that one of the most successful German merchant raiders in the First World War started life as a banana boat called Pongo. Never under estimate the speed and power of fruit carriers!
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  32. Historograph has an excellent video on the battle with great maps that makes what happened where much clearer. It is a great compliment to Drach's video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV4lZJGsMm4
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  33.  @Johnnycdrums  But didn't King cause huge numbers of American merchant ships to be sunk (and thousands of sailors killed) because he refused to implement convoys escorted by destroyers and frigates?
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  34. The Australians have a couple of 30,000 ton carriers complete with ski jumps that they cutely call "helicopter docks". Of course if China gets nasty, they need very few changes to host F-35s. Japan had a similar approach, it's just that they are more honest and don't pretend their carriers are anything else.
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  35. Yeah, but all the measurements were in metric and the Yanks have proven they can't cope with metric many, many times.
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  36.  @nimbusshadow-wings  I'm not that religious, but it reminds me of the story of the Prodigal Son; a kid leaves home, takes his inheritance and leads a wild and profligate lifestyle. When the misbehavior catches up with him and he apologizes to his parent, he is forgiven and welcomed back into the family. That analogy works if you see "Murica as the prodigal child, Britain as the parent of the family and countries like Australia and Canada as siblings.
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  37.  @RCAvhstape  Yep, if you want to create a feeling of contempt rather than respect, name a ship after a politician. But I guess the British have already used most of the cool names and the Americans don't want to name their ships after British ones.
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  38.  @richardvernon317  Also known as 'The Black Gang', because they were usually covered in coal dust.
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  39. It's at the end of Drach's comments, just below the main video. Most video producers on YouTube put their music credits there, but for some reason, viewers keep asking rather than looking in the obvious place.
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  40. I wonder what the British did with their monitors after D-Day? I know they moved a lot of carriers and battleships to the Indian and Pacific oceans, so perhaps the monitors went with them and bombarded places like Burma or Borneo?
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  41. No Flower class were built anywhere in Australia. However the Australians did build 60 Bathurst class corvettes to their own design in 8 different shipyards all around the country.
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  42. I've watched every Drach video EXCEPT the live streams. After I watched a few, I concluded they were for dreamers, lots of unlikely "what if" scenarios, even a fair few space ship fantasies. They are good if you like that sort of thing, but I prefer factual stuff over fantasy, so the live streams are definitely not for me. Still, that is the place where people donate decent amounts of money, so they probably fund the whole channel.
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  43.  @matthewrobinson4323  Personally I have trouble with the anthropomorphisation of things that are not alive, especially assigning them genders. But if we assume ships are actually living creatures, just yesterday I was chatting to a nice little frigate and it assured me that it was not a girl.
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  44. In the early 1990s, Incat, an Australian company that makes large, fast car ferries decided to have a try for the Blue Riband. They carefully studied the rules for the Hales Trophy which was awarded to the holders of the Blue Riband and decided to try and win it. So they diverted a ship on a delivery run to Europe to go via New York, took on a token number of passengers and proceded to break the record. But the custodians of the Hales Trophy were patriotic 'Muricans and would not give it to them. So Incat broke the record again with another ferry. But they still had to go to court to extract the trophy from those who thought the United States should hold it forever. After all this, those who thought that a mere car ferry should not hold the prestigious Blue Riband started a campaign to change the rules so that only "dignified" ships could hold it and claimed that the Hales Trophy didn't represent the Blue Riband. It's all amazingly silly really, but for nearly 30 years the Hales Trophy has been proudly displayed at Incat's Hobart shipyard.
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  45. It depends where you are in Australia. In Queensland aircon is very common, in Tasmania or the mountains in the south east of the mainland, it's hardly ever going to be used.
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  46.  @154Kilroy  Well I was just pointing out an instance where naval guns were used against the landlocked Boer army. This was only 15 years earlier, so any middle aged military officer would remember it. But I agree, the chance of it ever happening again was tiny. I think @Emdiggydawg 's suggestion is far more likely.
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  47. Wonderful news! I do hope they have the obsessive historic detail that Peter Weir put into the original and that they avoid tacky populist add ons like romances and umm... ethnic issue sub plots. I would be devastated if it was similar to Pirates of the Caribbean.
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  48. I have this image of them choosing the crew they would most like to get rid of, if the ship sinks, So the captain would be an irritating smart arse, the officers would be an idiot who somehow fluked their way through naval college and a bully who persecuted people at naval college but never got caught in the act. The CPO would be a formerly capable man, who appears to be going senile, etc.
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  49. S.Y. Endurance that sank in 1915 was not a naval ship, it was just a ice strengthened civilian steam yacht. However the British did name two navy ships in its honour. The first HMS Endurance was an ice patrol ship that saw action in the Falklands War, the second was a 1990s ice breaker.
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  50. Agreed, I always think of the Alaska Class as battlecruisers, although pedants point out that they only fulfill 4 of the 5 categories to be a battlecruiser and maintain that the Alaskas were extra super-dooper ultra heavy cruisers. So I like the description of the Deutschlands as "budget battlecruisers".
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