It's time once again for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.
Overhauls are Carrier Doom Parts one and two, Reactivation, Bringing Back the Battleships, The Ticonderoga Class and for 2024, Fuzes Parts one and two.
Comments
Inspired by some of the William D Brown award candidates, why do warships seem to be more at risk from accidents in harbour than at sea?
When the Russians claimed that Moskva caught fire, exploded, and sank while underway; nyet, nothing to do with any Ukrainian action; that seemed unlikely. Yet even competent navies like the British and Japanese managed to explode battleships in harbour. (Vanguard, Mutsu.)
Absence of crew? Presence of harbour workers? Other suggestions?
Some of it is just statistical. Both Vanguard and Mutsu spent a lot more time in harbor than out of it, and that's basically 100% of it for Vanguard, IIRC. Some of it is that stuff happens in harbor which you don't do at sea, be it heavy maintenance work or brewing homemade alcohol (a leading theory for Mutsu). And some of it is that in harbor, you have fewer people paying less attention in case things go wrong.
More broadly, it's easy to miss how much time warships spent in harbor before WWII. There weren't the sort of deployments you get today, with a handful of exceptions (such as the Great White Fleet) so outside of training, they mostly stayed in port. Not always their own ports, either, but you'd do a couple years on a station, with a forward homeport, instead of the kind of 6-month rotations that the USN uses now.