The interesting ship photos/art thread.

[LoooSeR 6,096]

[LoooSeR 6,096]

Aurora is back to St.Petersburg after repairs.

http://bmpd.livejournal.com/2021985.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is now on the other side of bridge from my work place. On the photo you can see a tip of the building on the left, where the office is (Petrovskiy Fort)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[LoooSeR 6,096]

Alabama as a target for aviation bomb effectivnes tests, 1921.

 

 

And the video:

[Belesarius 1,475]

 

USS Maryland, Pearl Harbor, July 10, 1944

[Collimatrix 3,715]

US Navy video discussing the adoption of the angled flight deck:

 

 

Includes hairy footage of landing jets on carriers with straight decks.  Audio is a little messed up.

[LostCosmonaut 2,345]

Article about an underground Swedish naval base (and some other stuff); https://books.google.ca/books?id=fD8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA121&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=true

[LostCosmonaut 2,345]

My recollection is that early naval nuclear reactor design was all over the place.  They weren't really sure what they were doing in those days.

 

Thing is, good luck ever finding anyone who knows what the improvements actually are.  Or someone who knows who will talk.  Or figuring it out from any sort of textbook; you can find all sorts of resources on the minutiae of civil boiling water reactor design.  Extrapolating that to fast neutron designs seems dubious.

 

So yeah, it's definitely better now, but I'm not sure exactly in what ways it's better now.

 

Without going beyond what's on wiki, the US Navy has tested reactors that don't need coolant pumps (at some power levels) and don't have control rods.

 

As far as reactor design being all over the place in the early years, well, the S1G existed.

[Belesarius 1,475]

http://www.janes.com/article/62669/south-korea-launches-first-pkx-b-missile-craft

 

[LoooSeR 6,096]

[Belesarius 1,475]

[LoooSeR 6,096]

St.Petersburg, probably Navy fleet day.

[Bronezhilet 1,193]

[Bronezhilet 1,193]

[Collimatrix 3,715]

This thread needs more Kirov-class goodness:

 

 

 

 

I'd read that these things were huge, but it didn't hit me how huge they were until I realized that they displace only slightly less than a WWII era Essex-class fleet carrier.

 

The propulsion is bizarre too; nuclear plant for cruise, and an auxiliary oil-fired boiler that can be turned on when it needs extra giddyup.  Surprisingly, they're not especially fast; with both propulsion systems running they're about half a knot faster than the Iowa-class battleships that were recommissioned in response to these monsters.

[Collimatrix 3,715]

The rather odd Japanese carrier Ryujo, in a colorized photograph:

 

[LoooSeR 6,096]

Soviet heavy cruiser Frunze and Chinese Chongqing destroyer

 

[Belesarius 1,475]

[Collimatrix 3,715]

Which French battleship is that?

[Khand-e 1,911]

Which French battleship is that?

 

Wait, when did the Royal Navy become part of the French Navy is the real question?!

[Collimatrix 3,715]

Ever since the HUNDRED YEARS' WAR PART DEUX!

 

(my ship ID skills are n00b class)

[Khand-e 1,911]

Basically that's a Mark III quad turret yet to be fitted to a ship that was used specifically on the second King George V class of battleships in a rather bizarre 4-2-|-4 gun turret layout for it's x10 14"/45 Mark 7 main guns.

 

One rather annoying design quirk in the photo you can see is that you have to painstakingly take apart the entire gun housing just to change out a single barrel, and considering how fast battleship main gun barrels wear out, I'm really not sure who thought that was a great idea.

[xthetenth 257]

Basically that's a Mark III quad turret yet to be fitted to a ship that was used specifically on the second King George V class of battleships in a rather bizarre 4-2-|-4 gun turret layout for it's x10 14"/45 Mark 7 main guns.

 

One rather annoying design quirk in the photo you can see is that you have to painstakingly take apart the entire gun housing just to change out a single barrel, and considering how fast battleship main gun barrels wear out, I'm really not sure who thought that was a great idea.

 

The 4-2-4 layout makes sense, the B turret is the most expensive in terms of stability and you need a quad turret to hit 10 guns with only three turrets (good for weight, barbettes are heavy).

 

The way you can tell it's not French is that the French turrets were internally subdivided so rather than four evenly spaced barrels they had two pairs. I think that's part of the reason they were unreasonably inaccurate until fitted with delay coils (I know it was postwar for the Richelieus). Shells are very fast and to get them to land close you need to get them to fly basically the same path, so if you have to fire them around the same time (and not doing so for guns off the centerline isn't in the cards until quads because they move the turret off line). So you've got shells flying very fast, very close, and their flight is to very precise tolerances.

 

Part of that is just that the KGVs were quite heavily armored. A comparison of the North Carolina class and the KGVs shows that you can armor for or arm with a reasonable number of 16" guns. Pick one.

 

Speaking of the North Carolinas and to a lesser degree quad turrets...

[Belesarius 1,475]

 

HMS Renown, mid '30s.

[Collimatrix 3,715]

 

A colorized picture of Yamato during construction.  This was a battleship so powerful and fearsome that it was almost not defeated by a bunch of destroyer escorts and jeep carriers.

[Belesarius 1,475]

 

HMS Repulse, 1926