It's time once again for our regular open thread. Talk about anything you want that isn't culture war.

This weekend would have been LA Fleet Week, and thanks to coronavirus, it's gone virtual this year, so we can all participate. After a significant amount of digging, I was able to find their actual plans, which "include active Navy ship tours, Navy band concerts, and speakers showing their support for this incredible event." This sounds at least potentially interesting, although I don't know what a virtual ship tour looks like. Also, this is all being restricted to their social media. But I'll keep an eye on it and let you know if anything cool pops up.

Also, Data Secrets Lox (a forum spinoff of the blog that spawned Naval Gazing) is holding an effortpost contest to find the best long-form writing there. Some of the entries are excellent. And some were written by me in a fit of ADD. I am definitely not asking you to vote for that one.

2018 overhauls are my reviews of Constitution and Battleship Cove, The Battleship of the Future?, Underwater Protection Part 2, Understanding Hull Symbols and Lushunkou and Weihaiwei. 2019 overhauls are my pictures of Iowa's medical spaces, A Brief Overview of the United States Fleet, the David Taylor Model Basin, the last part of the Spanish-American War series and riverine warfare in North America and Africa.

On board all naval vessels at sea and in port, and at our many island bases in the Pacific, there is rejoicing and thanksgiving. The long and bitter struggle, which Japan started so treacherously on the seventh of December, 1941, is at an end.

I take great pride in the American forces which have helped to win this victory. America can be proud of them. The officers and men of the United States Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard and Merchant Marine who fought in the Pacific have written heroic new chapters in this nation’s military history. I have infinite respect for their courage, resourcefulness and devotion to duty. We also acknowledge the great contribution to this victory made by our valiant Allies. United we fought and united we prevail. Read more...

The only truly novel variety of merchant ship to arrive in the years after WWII was the offshore service vessel, designed to cater to the increasing needs of the offshore oil and gas industry. Until WWII, offshore drilling was done with the rig on a permanant platform, often a pier extending from shore, or a barge that was simply submerged, with the limiting depth that of the barge's freeboard. But after the war, improved technology allowed drillers to work much further out at sea, and making it harder to supply them with everything they needed, from drill pipes and tools to food, fuel and fresh water. Initially, converted landing craft were used for this purpose, but they were unsatisfactory, and something better was needed.

Ramla Bay, the earliest supply vessel I could find a picture of

Alden 'Doc' LaBorde, president of a Louisiana company specializing in offshore drilling, came up with the solution, starting from a blank sheet of paper. The resulting vessel, Ebb Tide, was extremely odd-looking, with a bridge salvaged from a tugboat far forward and a low-freeboard open deck aft that took up 90 of the vessel's 119-foot length. In operation, it would come alongside the rig, where a crane would lift off the cargo on the deck, and hoses could be rigged for the water and fuel stored in tanks within the ship. The whole thing was deliberately kept very simple, allowing the ship to operate from whatever bayou happened to be closest to the drill site, and proved a tremendous success in operations in the Gulf of Mexico. Sisters of Ebb Tide, dating back to the 50s, remained in service for forty years. Read more...

In early April 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a few desolate rocks in the South Atlantic. The British mobilized their fleet in response. After a fierce battle in the air and at sea, the British gained the upper hand, and began landing troops on May 21st at San Carlos Water on the west coast of East Falkland. The Argentinians attempted to defeat the invasion with air attacks, but the British eventually gained the upper hand. On the 28th, the British, despite some setbacks, began the ground campaign, defeating the Argentinian garrison at Goose Green and opening the way to lay siege to the main enemy positions near Stanley. The first days of June saw the islands shrouded in clouds, but that didn't prevent the British from leapfrogging forward to Fitzroy and Bluff Cove, just to the south of Stanley. There, tragedy struck on June 8th, when an air attack caught several ships unloading.¹

An artillery battery in the Falklands

Despite the losses at Bluff Cove, the British continued their buildup for the assault on Stanley. All of the helicopters and crews had finally arrived, giving a total of 40 during the day and 4 at night, most employed bringing up artillery ammunition to the British forward batteries. The 9th was quiet, with only a couple of air raid warnings and no actual attacks. Survivors from Bluff Cove were evacuated to the hospital ship Uganda, while there was the usual shuffle of ships between San Carlos, the carrier group, and the logistics area. Read more...

Gentlemen,

We are at war again. Germany and Britain decided to have a fight, and we are backing Britain under the terms of our alliance. The initial clash between our destroyers in the North Sea resulted in a significant fraction of the German's modern destroyers resting on the bottom, while we escaped without losses.

In other news, things are going pretty well. We've laid down a pair of new CAs, a new CL and a bunch of new minesweepers, as well as finally getting dive bombers into service and developing the capability to design our own torpedo bombers. Our aviation capabilities have grown in other ways, and we are expanding air bases near the North Sea. Read more...

Tugs are ancient. Thousands of years ago, the Egyptians used oared vessels to pull barges on the Nile. Until the invention of the steam engine, any vessel which needed to be moved against wind or tide would be pulled, usually by boats but potentially from ashore or by an anchor. The first operational steamships were tugs. Particularly in the early days, when steam engines were far too fuel-hungry to be practical on their own on any but the shortest routes, steam tugs were prized for their greater power and economy relative to rowing. Some were even used in the open sea, most notably in the runup to the Battle of Cape St. Vincent during the Portuguese Liberal Wars. Charles Napier, commanding the Liberal fleet, planned to use his tugs to bring his fleet into position, but the tugs either refused or were contractually forbidden from doing so depending on which account you believe.²

Many of these early tugs were incredibly primitive. An example is 1833's Monarch, featured in Turner's famous painting The Fighting Temeraire. Her engine provided only 20 hp to her paddle wheels, which were fixed to act in unison. This made her difficult to turn, and the process involved shifting iron ballast from side to side on rails to immerse one or the other wheel more deeply.³ Later paddle tugs could turn their paddles in different directions, giving excellent maneuverability, although developments in the design of screw propellers meant that most operators began to abandon them around 1900. A few operators, such as the Royal Navy, continued to use them, and the last RN paddle tug, Forceful, wasn't retired until 1980. Read more...

The late 19th century saw the development of smokeless powder, which replaced the traditional black powder with something that was more powerful, burned more consistently, and was hopefully safer. These powders were split into two categories: single-base powders that were based entirely on nitrocellulose and used by the US and France, and double-base powders that contained nitroglycerine as well, and were used by the British and Germans. Before the war, a number of ships were destroyed by internal explosions, but it was believed that these had mostly been solved.

HMS Bulwark explodes

Unfortunately, this was not the case. The first warning came to the British in November 1914, just after the outbreak of war, when the pre-dreadnought Bulwark exploded after some cordite charges were left against the boiler-room bulkhead, killing all but a dozen men onboard. Neither this nor various prewar explosions nor the loss of the armored cruiser Natal a year later to a similar explosion were enough to shake British confidence in their cordite, as they had run a number of tests which seemed to confirm its safety. None involved a reasonable quantity of cordite in a confined space, an oversight that would prove disastrous on one day in 1916. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about anything you want, so long as it's not culture war.

I'm going to highlight a non-naval military history resource. Nicholas Moran, also known as the Chieftain, is a tank historian, but a really good one. He's also a tanker in real life, and spends a bunch of time on the bits like ergonomics and maintainability that aren't nearly as easy to find in a typical reference book. The best series is probably "inside the Chieftain's Hatch", where he crawls over a historic tank and talks through all of the various features.

He works for wargaming.net, the people behind World of Tanks and World of Warships. I have extremely mixed feelings about them. They're an Iowa sponsor, and I'm grateful for that, as well as for the amount of money they've pumped into military history in general, but I also am not a huge fan of their products. And the less said about their video on the Iowa, the better.

On another note, I'm planning on dusting off some of the "So You Want to Build a Modern Navy" stuff for the virtual meetup tomorrow. Just in case anyone was wanting more of that.

2018 overhauls are Missouri Part 2, Nautical Measurements,* Falklands Part 5, Underwater Protection Part 1, My review of the International WWII Museum and the Standard Type battleships. 2019 overhauls are turret designations, Naval Weddings and wedding decorations, Spanish-American War parts seven and eight and Falklands Part 17.

The development of smokeless powder in the late 19th century marked a radical change in gun propellants. Previously, all powder had been a mechanical mixture of oxidizers and fuels, and had turned less than 50% of its weight into gas, with the rest (mostly potassium compounds) making up the bulk of the smoke. Smokeless powders were single substances which could turn completely into gas, reducing smoke and increasing the energy released.

Paul Vieille

The first chemical explosive to be discovered was nitrocellulose, also known as guncotton, in 1846. Nitrocellulose is produced by the application of concentrated nitric acid on cellulose, the usual source of which is either cotton or wood shavings. Early nitrocellulose was unstable and dangerous to make, and a practical method didn't arrive until the 1860s. Even then, it burned entirely too quickly to be suitable for use in guns, because it was still cotton-like, allowing virtually the entire mass to burn at once. Instead, it was used primarily in torpedoes and mines and for blasting purposes. It wasn't until 1884 when the first proper smokeless powder was produced, by French chemist Paul Vieille. His Poudre B consisted of a mix of different types of nitrocellulose, some with more nitro groups than others, gellatinized using ether and an alcohol. It was then rolled into flat sheets, dried, and cut into strips or squares. This meant that only a relatively small proportion could burn at any one time, spreading out the gas production and making it a viable propellant.⁴ Read more...

Gunpowder first revolutionized warfare in the 13th century, with the invention of practical cannons. Over the centuries, improvements in powder went hand-in-hand with developments in gun design. But it wasn't until 1839, when French scientist Guillaume Piobert figured out how powder burned, that research could be placed on a truly scientific footing.

Different sizes of black powder grains

The ideal powder would instantly produce enough gas to reach the maximum pressure the gun could safely stand, and then moderate its burning rate to keep the pressure at the same level until the projectile reaches the muzzle. This is obviously impossible in practice, because as Piobert figured out the rate of gas production is proportional to the surface area that is currently ignited (in other words, powder burns only on the outside, and thus outside-in), and also rises with increasing pressure, although the relationship is more complicated and depends on the powder. Read more...