The Drydock - Episode 125

Q&A: Let's suppose that I was a young crewman on a United States merchant sailing ship (not a warship), say, in 1813, and one of the Royal Navy's ships captured her. How likely would it be that I would be impressed into the Royal Navy? And if that happened, what would my life be like based upon what the Fates had dealt to me? (If this is a question that you would like to make into a Wednesday special, I ask an alternate Drydock query below.) Q&A alternate: If a sole Royal Navy ship during WWI were in the position of the RMS Lusitania on May 7, 1915, where it had previously made a mistaken sighting of a landmark previously due to fog/low visibility, and then sighted the Old Head of Kinsale), would it have taken a four point bearing (which, per "The Last Voyage of the Lusitania", by AA and Mary Hoehling (a childhood favourite book of mine), required sailing on a steady course at a somewhat reduced speed)? And, presuming that a four point bearing was against Royal Navy WWI procedure, especially since the Admiralty knew that U boats were active in the area, how would the Royal Navy ship have handled the sighting/navigation issue that faced the Lusitania when it sighted the Old Head of Kinsale?

Theodore Kamis

My understanding is that they were going to oringinally name it the KGVI class, but the King asked that he be named in memory of his father instead. KGVI was called the Duke of York before his coronation, but there was no Duke of York at the time of the ship's launching. So was this a nod to the current King?

On the topic of KGV names, the first ship KGV is quite clear; the name of the ruling monarch, and the previous HMS KGV had been scrapped. Then King Edward VIII took the throne, and the next ship was duly named for him. But when he abdicated and King George VI took his place, the KE was renamed not KGVI but Prince of Wales. And the following ship was the Duke of York, a name with virtually no Royal Navy pedigree. Can you explain these last two choices?

Drydock ?: It has been reported that the last two KGV class battleships were to be named after Jellicoe and Beatty, but were changed to Anson and Howe. Why was that done?

Kristin

5 Minute Guide: IJN Akizuki-class AA Destroyers. Hopefully they are already on the long list, but here is a nomination just in case. I am putting this here because I am not going to get a Google/YouTube account

Jelly Jellybean

Hector was a good print on demand guy. "Hector I need a hundred pallets of X". Hector "K do you need some now?" . Me "Yup". he was about twenty minutes away by road and there would be stock to be taken. He was a very good guy.

chris

Thankyou for enabling closed captions/subtitles on this video

Roger H

Some neat stuff this Drydock. I’d never heard of coal degradation. Many people think of the ships back then being primitive, without understanding the complexity of the equipment, nor the complexity of the requirement to avoid the ship becoming an inadvertent submarine, or just falling apart the first time the engines were run. Thanks for all the hard work!

Wayne Borean

Squid also had the advantage of being a product of the main technological development committee for the RN (which hedgehog was most definitely not). The amount of book space given to Squid bears this out (it WAS good, but had less than 20 total kills, with a nice percentage, and none before D-Day) but NO "official" book on WWII weapons fails to praise it to the skies (and trumpet the percentages, while ignoring the low use numbers. The USN bought 2 for experimental use, but stuck with Hedgehog (and went down the homing torpedo path pioneered by Fido for future needs).

Andrew Dederer

I would love to see the First Sea Lord to propose to Parliament a new class of post-dreadnought, the Thunderchild II class, complete with the new Iron Duke IPBM (Inter Planetary Ballistic Missile) system.

Theodore Kamis

Imagine an admiral lobbying for construction appropriations for an Hyper Awesome Lave 9000 Dreadnought (alias - the HAL 9000 Dreadnought). The treasury agent responds, "what are you doing Dave?

Smokey The Bear