Today is the 77th anniversary of Iowa's first commissioning, at New York Navy Yard.
February 22, 2020
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Comments
Sad topic, but how long do you think it's feasible to maintain a modern museum warship? Would she ever get to the state where (permanent?) drydocking is necessary, like the Victory?
SS Great Britian, being iron-hulled is probably a better comparison.
It's permanently drydocked in Bristol and it seems the main problem they have to mitigate is corrosion.
But that's after spending 1845-1937 afloat, being scuttled and abandoned in the Falklands then refloated in 1970 and towed across the Atlantic.
I'd expect Iowa to last a lot longer, considering advances in metallurgy and iron-hulled shipwrighting as well as it just having a thicker hull.
The Forth Bridge is a good demonstration of how long iron can last in close proximity to saltwater, so long as you keep repainting it.
As Lambert says, Victory is a bad example because she's built from wood, and wooden ships are very different from steel. Constitution, almost as old, is still afloat.
But even among metal ships, I'm not sure because there simply isn't enough data. Great Britain is drydocked, Warrior is afloat, Olympia and Texas are both afloat but in bad shape. But I don't know enough about the specific mechanisms of long-term corrosion to be sure about what caused the issues for them, or how differing metallurgy changed their resistance to corrosion. I do remember hearing that most early steel was significantly less resistant to corrosion than wrought iron (which they didn't really understand until later), but that might just be a problem for Texas and Olympia. I know that there's an active cathodic protection system on Iowa, which should help, but I have no idea how that translates into years.