In the comments recently, someone made reference to Oriskany receiving an aluminum deck as part of her SCB-125A refit. And something smelled off about that claim. It was the sort of thing I really should have remembered if it was true, because it's such a delightfully weird bit of trivia. So I started digging.

Oriskany in her original configuration

Now, before I go further, I should probably explain what I'm talking about. Oriskany was one of the Essex class carriers, famous as the backbone of the carrier task forces in WWII. But she had a rather unique history. She was still incomplete at the end of the war, and it was becoming obvious that significant modifications were going to be required to allow the existing carriers to operate the new jets entering service. So in 1947, she became the prototype for what was known as SCB-27A, refitting the Essexs with more powerful catapults, improved arresting gear, stronger elevators and flight deck, and an island rebuilt to be smaller and have better spots for radar. All of this added significant weight, requiring the ships be blistered to compensate despite the removal of the armored belt. But it was also necessary to keep the numerous Essexs viable in a world where funds for newer ships were difficult to find. Read more...

This is a first, but hopefully not a last. While on my quest to see the Coast Artillery Museum before it closed, I took a few hours to stop in Bremerton and see the destroyer Turner Joy, as well as the Puget Sound Navy Museum a couple blocks away. But while I've reviewed a lot of museums, and even in some cases reviewed a ship twice, what makes this unique is that reader Evan Þ reviewed it four years ago, giving me an opportunity to compare my take on the ship to his.

Website

First, some logistical bits to get out of the way: if you're coming from Seattle, Turner Joy is a short walk from the terminus of the Bremerton-Seattle ferry. If you're not, you need to find parking in downtown Bremerton, because neither museum has its own parking lot. I would recommend the former, if possible, because the later is annoying and/or expensive. Read more...

Nine years. That's how long it's been since I started this blog, and I'm amazed that it's still going strong. It's been far longer since this stopped being the official day for the celebration of the USN, but we'll ignore that.

Thanks to quanticle for this year's poster

The highlight of the year was obviously the Dayton meetup. Thanks to everyone who came to that, and in particular to John and Laz for doing parts of the tour, Rebecca, the Friedmans and my mom for cooking, and everyone who contributed gear to make that possible. I plan to do next year's in LA, although the details are still up in the air. Cassander did the heresy tour and contributed a couple of posts (although I didn't get any guest museum reviews, so consider this a call for those) and Obormot kept things running on the technical side. I also appreciate everyone who makes the Discord a fun place to hang out, and those who participated in the book club earlier in the year. I do intend to restart that once things elsewhere in my life calm down some. And of course, there's Lord Nelson, ho has to put up with me bursting in at random times talking about some mostly-forgotten battle. But most of all, it's the people who read and comment who make this worth doing. On to year 10.

Aircraft and submarines seem like strange bedfellows. Beyond each operating entirely immersed in a single fluid, they don't have much in common. But that hasn't stopped attempts to make them work together, usually with extremely limited results.

U-12 with an FF.29 aboard

The first collaboration between submarines and aircraft took place barely a decade after both entered widespread service. In the opening days of the First World War, after securing most of the Belgian coast, the Germans established a base at Zebrugge, where submarines could attack shipping in the North Sea. One of these scored an early victory, sinking three British armored cruisers, and they generally made the southern reaches of the North Sea untenable for the British. Soon, a small group of Friedrichshafen FF.29 floatplanes were added, almost as an afterthought, and their operators had to figure out what to do with them. In addition to the obvious (patrolling the North Sea), they fitted their planes to carry tiny bombs and began launching raids on the southeastern bits of England. The problem that these first aerial raiders over Britain faced was that their planes were still incredibly primitive, and it was often a struggle to make the 150 nm round trip to even the nearest portions of the UK before the fuel lines plugged or the igniters fouled. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

Overhauls are Going back to Iowa, Survivability - Flooding and Fire, Underbottom Explosions, In Defense of Missile Defense, and for 2025, Exotic Hulls Parts five and six, Drone Countermeasures and Happy 250th USN.

I've been busy the last few weeks, and the blog post I had planned didn't quite come together in time, so please have this extract from the tour I did at the National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton back in May. (I'm also still working on editing the audio recording of the tour. As I said, I've been busy.)

At the dawn of the 20th century, it looked like man was finally on the verge of fulfilling his dream of flying like the birds. The first people to disconnect themselves from Earth's surface by a means other than falling off something were Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes, who rode the Montgolfier brothers' hot air balloon in 1783, but most people soon realized that this mechanism wasn't very good, and many of the greatest scientists and engineers of the age turned their attention to the problem of flight using lift instead of buoyancy. Among those interested in the problem were a pair of brothers, proprietors of a bicycle shop about six miles from where you are standing right now.

Wilbur and Orville Wright

Orville and Wilbur Wright first became interested in the problem of powered flight in 1899, reading everything available on the subject and then beginning their own experiments with gliders. Ultimately, they made two major innovations. First, unlike most other prospective airplane designers, they realized that the biggest problem would be controlling the airplane in the air, and developed a method of warping the wings to control roll. Ailerons eventually turned out to be a better option, but it was a significant breakthrough at the time. Second, after a series of experiments with full-scale gliders in 1901 in a windy town on the coast of North Carolina known as Kitty Hawk,¹ they realized that the aerodynamic data they had been using wasn’t very good, and set about gathering their own, first conducting experiments using a bicycle to generate airflow and then building their own wind tunnel to study possible airfoil shapes. Read more...

Hornet wasn't the only museum I visited during my recent trip to San Francisco. There were three others, all on the San Francisco side of the Bay, and all confused about what sort of museum they were. Despite that, two are reasonably strong recommendations, while the third was fine, though I wouldn't recommend going out of the way for it.

The best of the three was the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos, about 30 miles south of San Francisco. It's firmly at the upper end of the medium air museum category, although it's not entirely sure if it wants to be an air museum with a major focus on children, or a children's museum with airplanes. Fortunately, it looks like they're the former for now, in addition to having probably the world's best collection of insanely dangerous rotorcraft. Read more...

The 9/11 attacks shook America to its core. Someone was responsible, and they would have to pay. The only questions were who and how. Who was surprisingly easy to figure out. A check of the passenger manifests revealed that several were known members of Al Qaeda, and intercepted communications between members of the group talked about a successful operation. But that made how extremely difficult.² Since Sudan had kicked him out under diplomatic pressure back in 1996, Osama bin Laden and most of his network had been based in Afghanistan, a country that was going to be as difficult to access for the US military as almost anywhere on the planet. Direct access from the sea was impossible, and the shortest route from US bases in the region ran through Iran, which was unlikely in the extreme to grant overflight rights. Coming in from the south would mean overflying Pakistan, the major sponsor of the Taliban, while access from the north meant going through Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan or Tajikistan, all former Soviet republics that the US wasn't particularly close to.

The last time the US had gone after bin Laden, in retaliation for the attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, it had used Tomahawk cruise missiles, flying through Pakistani airspace. But cruise missiles alone were clearly an inadequate response if the Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden, and a plan was put together under the codename Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF).³ Fortunately for the US, there was an active civil war in Afghanistan, with the so-called "Northern Alliance"⁴ still holding onto a significant corner of the country. Both sides were poorly equipped, but with US air support, coordinated by CIA and special forces teams, there was a good chance the Northern Alliance could rout the Taliban with minimal American presence on the ground. Read more...

There have been a few news stories lately about General Motors producing missile casings for the PAC-3, and delivering the parts within 22 days of the contract being signed. And, obviously, there has been commentary overinterpreting this as being a sign that players outside the traditional defense industry are better and that the glorious dawn of fast weapons manufacturing is just around the corner, if we embrace new, agile companies like... General Motors.

A PAC-3 missile with a defective casing

Obviously, I think all of this is nonsense. First, let's be clear what we're talking about. These are missile casings, basically mildly specialized pieces of metal. Shaping metal is not a particularly new technology, and I find it hard to believe that casings are the main limiting factor in expanding PAC-3 production. Seekers, warheads and motors are all much more specialized and much harder to expand. The most likely reason behind all of this is that there was some hiccup on the part of whoever normally makes the casings, and Lockheed turned to GM to bail them out. I spoke to an industrial engineer who has experience in missile production, and she said that 3 weeks would be a reasonable turnaround time for this kind of thing in the civilian world if the customer supplied the tooling. GM probably did some extra work to avoid the delays you frequently get on defense projects, but it's either a short-term stopgap or the whole thing was a publicity stunt, and Lockheed is now holding onto a bunch of casings that they won't use until mid-February. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.

Overhauls are Understanding Hull Symbols, Auxiliaries Part 3, ICNW Part 5, the Arleigh Burke class, Standard Part 1, Evan's review of Turner Joy, and for 2025, Exotic Hulls Parts two, three and four, as well as Fighting the Last War.