Search results

PRESIDENT, WARRIOR and BELFAST are not Royal Navy ships, so the Royal Navy cannot rename them, any more than it can rename me. Renaming ships was certainly done - UNICORN became UNICORN II, then CRESSY, before being paid off, and is back to UNICORN as a museum. But the appending of dates to...

That one's largely marketing - the museum by the name of HMS Belfast is neither a commissioned Royal Navy warship nor a seagoing vessel. There's no more need to rename her than there was a need to rename the Cunard liner MV QUEEN ELIZABETH when the aircraft carrier of that name was commissioned...

In fact, it's the testimony of Edward Wilding (one of Harland & Wolff's naval architects) at the British Wreck Commissioner's Inquiry where this first crops up. It isn't some half-baked modern theory, but one that was thought credible at the time. But it would have been an incredibly risky...

Steller's Sea Cow is an interesting one. It was able to be wiped out in a very short span of time because its' range was already greatly decreased, and populations under pressure. You see, Steller's Sea Cow grazed on kelp forests, which were dying off. Why were the kelp forests dying off? They...

Worth noting that you can get this without cheating at all. NELSON and RODNEY were lightened so aggressively to be certain they wouldn't come in over 35,000 tons, they came in just a little over 33,000 tons. By way of illustration, the Royal Navy had special aluminium tableware - which is...

Well yes, I doubt there's any point to building one. But the engineering difficulties wouldn't be insurmountable if one was wanted anyway.

Having done a bit of sniffing, it seems that TITANIC expected to enter New York with two days' coal in reserve. TITANIC seems to attract them: see also the 'defective rivets' and 'coal bunker fire' theories. Ultimately, the ship sank because the line's safety management system did not enable...

Unlikely, I would suggest - slow steaming almost invariably reduces fuel consumption per mile run. If need be, boilers could be shut down to avoid the need to keep the grate covered. Not an action that would be lightly taken, since it would scupper any chance of maintaining schedule, but it...

It could be done - a battery-electric vehicle using 1960s/1970s technology would be good for a range of about 50 miles (80 km) and a speed of about 50 mph (80 kph), give or take 20%. That's more than enough for a general runabout - even today, it would be enough for most cars most of the time...

The Swiss cheese model applies here - there wasn't just one thing that led to the collision, but there were many things that could have prevented it. The mirage effect didn't help matters, but it didn't make the iceberg totally invisible; different working practices could well have led to it...

Not infeasible, given the right design principles: It's done by having the bridge free to move with respect to both towers, rather than rigidly attached. A WTC skybridge could be built using similar principles, if it was thought to be worthwhile.

The lower yields in later weapons weren't because they couldn't do more, but because they realised that anything you'd be shooting at with nuclear artillery wasn't big enough to justify more than a few kilotons.

Per the graph up-thread somewhere, car ownership levelled out in that time period at a substantial minority of US population. I'd suggest that it's possible in this era for someone to argue that surface parking spreads out a city, making it harder for the common man to go about his business...

Pretty much any ship would have sunk if subjected to the damage the TITANIC suffered. Even the QUEEN MARY 2, built to the standards of a century later, wouldn't survive. It was seriously extreme damage - after the ship suffered it, the only remaining questions were how long it would take to sink...

I was talking about something a bit different to EA-6B ADVCAP, which seems to have come along after most of the A-6F story played out. I'd expect that if the A-6F came to pass a lot of its' upgrades would benefit the Prowlers. In which case you'd potentially see a combination of EA-6B ADVCAP and...

If the A-6F comes in - and I believe it was to have been newbuild, not refurbished A-6Es - I'd expect to see an equivalent EA-6C come along for the VAW squadrons. Which might get their numbers bumped too - the USN wants to see seven EA-18Gs in the future carrier air wing alongside five E-2Ds...

Or indeed the fact that Force Z was almost certainly within visual range of the Japanese 7th Cruiser Division during the night of 9th/10th, may even have actually sighted but misidentified a light on one of the Japanese ships, and the two surface forces sailed away from one another completely...

When the lighthouse on Stephens Island in Cook Strait is built, the assistant lighthouse keeper decides not to bring his pregnant cat with him. It may take David Lyall a little longer to formally describe the wren which he discovered, but it may well prevent him from also having to declare it...

All ships list to some extent - the questions are, is it enough to matter, and if so can it be corrected? On an aircraft carrier, you need to correct it dynamically anyway, because air group operations move the ship's centre of gravity quite a bit. Correcting it is easier on an oil-burning ship...

In the sense that the 'triad' concept is based on an 'iron triangle' of flexibility, survivability, and accuracy, yes. I'm not so sure that the three points within that triangle represented by bombers, ICBMs and SLBMs are privileged positions. As indeed they have, apart from the nuclear...