The first USS Constellation was one of the original six frigates authorized in 1794 to deal with Algerian pirates. She was built in Baltimore and went on to serve as one of the nascent country's main warships during the trade conflicts of the early 19th century. Today, USS Constellation is a museum ship in Baltimore harbor, alongside submarine Torsk and Coast Guard cutter Rodger B. Taney.

Constellation in Baltimore

But the ship in Baltimore is obviously a very different ship from the one launched in 1797, the result of a major rebuild at Norfolk in 1853. After that, she served as part of the blockading force during the Civil War and spent two decades as a training ship, taking midshipmen around the world, before being hulked at Newport. She remained there for decades, serving as the official flagship of the Atlantic Fleet during WWII before the Navy finally decided to dispose of her in the fiscally strained years after WWII. The citizens of Baltimore began a campaign to bring her home that paid off in 1955, when she was donated and plans were made to restore her as far as possible to her 1797 configuration. Read more...

As the end of the year draws close, the Naval Institute Press once again has put its books on sale. It's a better sale than last year, with everything not on clearance getting 50% off if you use the code HOLIDAY at checkout, although they haven't brought back free shipping. The vast majority of the stuff I use for Naval Gazing comes from them, so this is without a doubt the best time to build out your naval library.

Looking first over the new releases, there's the spring and fall catalogs, as well as the spring 2026 section. Unfortunately, it is here that USNI's strange operational decisions and/or ongoing IT woes cause problems, as several of the most interesting new releases, including the vital Seaforth World Naval Review 2026, French Aircraft Carriers 1910-2000, Japanese Aircraft Carriers 1920-1945 and Friedman's new The British Aircraft Carrier in Two World Wars are not in those catalogs. Ones that are in the catalog and are worth checking out include Friedman's new book on Cold War ASW (I already have a copy, and it's quite good), Paul Stillwell's book on New Jersey, Stephen McLaughin's new book on Tsarist Cruisers and the second volume of Friedman's new work on British carriers. Read more...

Reader Albert Liu has recently been to Japan, and has kindly contributed reviews of two places he visited.

Japan Coast Guard Museum

A North Korean spy ship¹

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Today is the day traditionally set aside for the celebration of the US Navy (although this hasn't been the case since the 1940s for complicated reasons of service politics) and the 8th anniversary of the blog.

It's been another good year, and I continue to be astonished at how a thing that started with an offhand blog comment has continued to run for most of a decade. Highlights for the year were the third Naval Gazing meetup in LA, and my appearance on Patrick McKenzie's Complex Systems podcast. Beyond that, there was the normal business of Naval Gazing and the continued existence of the Discord. And I'm looking forward to next year, particularly the meetup we have scheduled in Dayton on May 14th to 17th. Look for a signup in the next month or two.

As always, I'm grateful to everyone else who has helped with the blog over the last year. John Olsen, Alexander and John Schilling contributed guest posts, while Obormot has kept the blog running for me and Rebecca Friedman handled food for the meetup. And everyone who commented and engaged with my stuff made what I do worth it. And as always, Lord Nelson puts up with me as I work on this.

Thanks to everyone for reading.

I was in DC recently for the DSL meetup, which was just as much fun as usual. There was only one problem: the government was shut down, which in turn meant that the Smithsonian was also closed. But I didn't want to go to DC without going to a museum, and eventually I decided to lead an expedition to the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum, located in Memorial Continental Hall, not far from the White House.

Now, a museum dedicated to the decorative arts is not normally my cup of tea, and it isn't the sort of thing I typically review here because 31 rooms representing the American home throughout the 18th and 19th centuries isn't what you've come to Naval Gazing for.² The building itself is in the typical Washington Neoclassical style, and it's quite pretty, with a big library full of genealogical information at its center. Read more...

It's time for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

Overhauls are The Washington Treaty and for 2024 Suez parts two and three, my review of the National Guard Museum and theredlamb's review of the AMC Museum.

To complete our ongoing series on exotic hulls, it is now time to turn our attention to a type of vessel that not only straddles the boundary between the ship and the airplane, but arguably crosses it to be even more airplane than ship. Variously known as the Ground Effect Vehicle, Wing-in-Ground Effect or Ekranoplan,³ these look mostly like aircraft, but take advantage of a quirk of aerodynamics known as "ground effect" to greatly reduce drag, so long as they are operating near the surface.

It's probably worth starting by explaining what ground effect is and how it works. Basically, in the process of producing lift, an airplane's wing also produces a vortex that makes drag.⁴ But if the wing is close to the ground (or water), then the surface will disrupt the vortex, slashing drag dramatically, in a manner determined by the ratio of wingspan to height above the ground. For instance, a wing that is 10% of the wingspan above the ground will only experience about 20% of the induced drag it would at altitude, rising to around 50% at 20% wingspan. This makes taking off in an airplane easier, and landing a bit harder, and in theory could be used to significantly improve the performance of an airplane. Read more...

Tomorrow is the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States Navy, and as such, the internet is currently flooded with well-wishes. I figured I would add my own, which is also free for anyone to share on social media:

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Given the current concern around drones, it seems worth surveying possible countermeasures in a reasonably systematic way, looking at each category of possible solution and listing the pros and cons of each. Now, this is a big and rapidly-evolving area, and I'm not a specialist in it. But I have done some looking around, and it seems worthwhile to bring this up as a counter to a lot of the triumphalism around drones these days.

First, I'm going to limit the scope here to direct measures aimed at a non-cooperative drone. There are a lot of ways of reducing the drone threat that fall outside this purview, from blowing them up before they launch to compromising their software to simply not being within range, but that gets even more complicated and messy. Second, it's worth pointing out that there are many different scenarios where drones may need to be dealt with, and that some systems may work well in certain situations but not in others. For instance, broad-spectrum RF jamming is absolutely standard on the battlefield, but is not a particularly good first-line solution if you're trying to defend the White House. Read more...

The hovercraft is an extremely useful configuration for those who need true amphibious performance, but it also has serious limits, most notably the fact that it is inherently an active system, and takes almost as much power waiting as it does at full speed. This prompted designers to think about options for how to use the same basic technology, but in a more ship-compatible way.

A recreation of the "air cushion torpedo boat"

The basic idea of using air underneath a ship to make it go faster isn't new, and the first example predates the hovercraft by decades. Austrian naval officer Dagobert Muller von Thomamuhl developed an "air cushion torpedo boat" that used a separate engine to force air under the hull and could make 32 kts or more, a reasonably impressive performance for WWI, but not particularly spectacular. Other designers continued to produce similar schemes to make use of air to speed up their ships, such as the Hickman sea sled, which used the vessel's own motion to trap an air cushion underneath it and make its planing hull more efficient. A later plan, known as the hydrokeel, was tried on some protoype landing craft in the early 60s, and involved injecting air into the bottom of a W-shaped hull, sealed by a bow flap, in an attempt to make planing more efficient. Test showed that it wasn't really any faster than a conventional planing hull, and the idea was scrapped. Read more...