It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.
I've found a couple of interesting things to read lately. First, a writeup of US satellite intelligence on the Kirov class, which covers several major topics here. Second, if you want to know about the continuing travails of the US icebreaker program, check out Sixty Degrees North, a substack that follows this in great detail.
Overhauls are my review of Mystic Seaport, The Arleigh Burke class, The Coast Guard and for 2023, VLS and Megasilverfist's review of the West Australia Shipwrecks Museum.
Comments
Given how successful Israel appears to be at decapitation strikes against their further abroad enemies (obviously Nasrallah, but also various Iranian bombings), what's the best explanation for why they haven't been similarly successful against Hamas' leadership?
Given how successful Israel appears to be at decapitation strikes against their further abroad enemies (obviously Nasrallah, but also various Iranian bombings), what's the best explanation for why they haven't been similarly successful against Hamas' leadership?
Probably just not having the same degree of intelligence. My understanding is that after the 2006 war, Israel has been very focused on Hezbollah as a potential enemy and a lot more casual about Hamas. And you can't really build that kind of capability on the fly, either.
Also, Hamas's top leadership is probably colocated with several dozen Israeli hostages, and dead hostages are serious business in Israeli politics. Nobody who wants to remain PM of Israel, is going to order a bombing that he knows or strongly suspects will kill a hostage.
Clearing the spam from the sidebar - feel free to delete the duplicates afterwards.
Planning to look at whether I can actually fix that problem later, but in the meantime, Firefox 'Duplicate Tab' (in the right-click menu) with a comment written does duplicate the comment text.
As an FYI, I don't have anything beyond the sidebar (easily, at least) so clearing spam makes it harder for me to track it down and delete it. (I found the one in bibliography, and have passed a suggestion to Said Achmiz about how to reduce frequency.)
Sorry - I'm not particularly bothered by the spam myself (and would consider some potential solutions worse than the spam), but was vaguely (and very possibly mistakenly, but I didn't have time to investigate right then) concerned that having it visible might be attracting other spammers and/or getting us penalized in search engines etc.
And after our recent discussions of wanting an escort to protect you at night and referencing an earlier one on lack on initiative, it was too easy to imagine myself as that night guard shooting a shadower. (Even found it funny that it takes nine.)
I don't think it being visible in the sidebar is going to get a google penalty, and I don't know if I really care. I'm not monetized or anything, and I try my best not to care too much about traffic numbers. As for attracting spammers, well, I do my best, and the block list is pretty effective.
The problem with spam in the sidebar is that pushes actually worth reading comments down to the point at which we may not know they ever existed.
@Anonymous: it had the Batfish museum asking for @bean (who I mistakenly thought would see them all as admin, sorry), the two I linked above, and the current post before I cleared it.
Just read the Jylland review. One question I've always had about the late sail/steam transition era is how much labor-saving technology was developed to reduce crew size (especially the skilled you could send up the mast)
To my eye a lot of the hybrid ships look to have sails very much like ships of the line from 50 years earlier. Were there any notable improvements?
I know the clipper ships from the same era had tiny crews relative to sail area, but never knew how much of that was improvements in rigging vs skimping on expensive labor.
Jylland was a warship, which in that era meant crew size was dominated by manning the guns and even a full ship rig's worth of sail-handlers was kind of lost in the noise.
And the various sail training ships of the 20th century, wanted to pretty much maximize crew size for obvious reasons.
In between, the later commercial windjammers tended to shift towards for-and-aft rigging largely because the sail-handling crew could be substantially reduced. Especially with steam winches, so any rope required only one man no matter how much sail it was hauling around.
Hence, the largest pure sailing ship ever built was a seven-masted schooner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThomasW.Lawson_(ship)
I'm not sure that's entirely true. I know that manning dropped a lot after sailing rigs went away. Compare Monarch (wiki complement 605) with Devastation (410). I don't think the drop is because they got rid of the 7" guns fore and aft, and the 12" battery is the same.
I suspect that there were several factors here. Some of it was "that's the way we've always done it", which can take a while to overcome, particularly in that era. And square rigs do have a lot of advantages in terms of control and operations in light winds. If you grew up in the era where you had to rely entirely on sail, those are substantial, and the manpower isn't coming out of your pockets. And it's also worth pointing out how fast all this happened. In 1860, steam was still seen as somewhat unreliable, and "come into harbor with the engine broken" isn't a bonkers design criteria. A decade later, sail is on its way out, and it is worth noting that 1880s British cruisers in fact had the main and mizzen rigged fore-and-aft, as sail was now the system you used for long-distance cruising, and you didn't have to worry about working in formation or getting in and out of harbor with it. You're a cruiser, so you're on your own most of the time, and you use steam for harbor work.
Also, fore-and-aft rigs on big vessels require really big sails, which really need power to work them. (Note that this is an era where warships tended to be a lot bigger than merchant ships.) And that was a somewhat later innovation. Warrior's only steam auxiliaries when commissioned were a pump and the capstan winch, which was used to raise the anchors. Even hoisting the propeller was done by hand, requiring the majority of the crew, so there was no chance of working the sails that way. (Also, you couldn't work the rig if the boilers were secured, which wouldn't have been acceptable at the time, particularly in the RN.)
John Schilling:
Merchant ships could get by with smaller crews than warships due to not needing to man guns but not order of magnitude less (unless they used a more labor efficient sail plan) so those who operate the sails won't be lost in the noise (especially if you want to maneuver and shoot at the same time).
@Bernd
One thing clippers did to economise on crew size, before the shift to more use of fore & aft rig, was reduce the size of individual sails. So for example topsails - generally the largest sails on a conventional square rigged ship - were split into upper & lower. If you look at a picture of a clipper compared to one of an older square rigged ship, you'll see more but smaller sails per mast.
Plausibly gun crew were most of a wooden warship's crew but not an ironclad's: large guns require more crew per gun than small ones, but in well below proportion to their weight, and fewer when in a turret.
Wiki's gun crew numbers (14 for a 32pdr, 18 for a 68pdr, and assuming only one side crewed at a time) imply that on British steam+sail 3-deckers, ~80% of the total were gun crew. A direct comparison is available in the 101-gun, 930-crew Duncans, the nearly identical 91-gun (on the theory that having more space per gun would increase the rate of fire), 850-crew Bulwarks, and these cut down and armored to become the 24-gun, 605-crew Prince Consorts.
The first drop matches the no longer needed gun crew, but the second drop is smaller than that would predict. And yes, there does seem to have been another drop in crew size when sails were removed, with Monarch vs Devastation being roughly typical. These suggest that (in this time period) wooden warship crew size was set by in-battle requirements, but ironclad crew size was set by out-of-battle requirements, when the sails were in use and the guns weren't; however, this is speculative.
"Merchant ships could get by with smaller crews than warships due to not needing to man guns but not order of magnitude less"
Pretty close to that, actually. Merchant ships in the early 19th century averaged 6 crew per 100 tons BOM. Warships averaged a bit over 30 crew per 100 tons, I believe still BOM. That's a factor of five, and if we assume the non-fighting crew is split evenly between sail-handlers and command+specialists, then the fighters will outnumber the literal sailors roughly 10:1
This starts to change mid-century when ships get fewer but bigger guns, and engines that need both stokers and mechanics in good number. But HDMS Jylland was built as a fairly traditional 44-gun heavy frigatem, albeit with an auxiliary engine.