Naval History Forums

There's a picture of a damaged cutter and one davit lying on the sea floor.

AFAIK all small boats were removed except the both cutters between turret I and III(starboard) and II and IV (port). But to be honest, I can't see the two cutters on any of my pictures of Rheinübung. :? The cradles were bolted to the upper deck and removable. There are pictures where we can possibly...

The portholes could be openend.

Well, at least for the German navy and its shipyards it was ordered to save Aluminium at almost any cost. I've a copy of the directive in my private collection.

Both were crew members of Graf Spee and were interned in Argentinia after the scuttling

I am not the first person to express concerns about the discrepancy between published shipyard trials data at 43000mt and speed claims for Bismarck and Tirpitz. I quote myself: Much more interesting is that Breyer/Koop are citing Groener. There we can find the same table like the "Results of D...

Hello Duncan,

Here you have the definition of "Zuladung":
Important is the word "entspricht".

Here you have the passage from Tirpitz's manual "Schiffskunde" about ballast water.
I see no reason why they shouldn't have used ballast water.

Duncan, what you're referring to is an inclining test. One needs the exact weight of the ship during this kind of test. Any other weight would be useless for determining the correct metacentric height. For a speed trial or a fuel consumption trial one needs the weight of the ship in a certain standa...

alecsandros wrote:Thank you very much nevertheless, Marc! Great info!

Can you please tell me if Tirpitz's 30.8kts was achieved also at 75% load ?

According to the document, yes.

@delcyros Bismarck’s speed/power-curve ends at 156,000 SHP. OTOH Tirpitz’s speed/power-curve ends at 166,000 SHP. There was a trial run of Tirpitz with 163,000 SHP and 30.8 kts. 30.6 kts would have been about 158.000 SHP. The curves for TP and BS are identical up to ~55,000 SHP. Then BS is faster th...

These loading weights are not well defined, and IMHO do not correspond to actual displacements, but are a percentage of design full load, which was considerably less than their actual full load values. I'm sorry Duncan, but the loading weights are well defined: 1.jpg The values for Bismarck accordi...

@delcyros There are two complete speed/power curves (each for one ship), starting from 7.5 kts and 2000 SHP up to 30+ kts. On these curves are markings (puncture with a small circles) for the speed/power pairs of values of the trial runs. There are only the 0% and 100%-weights of Tirpitz. Compared t...

Eureka! There's an original document of the EKK (Erprobungskommando Kriegsschiffneubauten) with a comparison of the speed/power curves of Tirpitz and Bismarck. It clearly states that Bismarck made 30.1 kts at 150,170 SHP and 75% payload.

But You agree that there is a difference between "erreicht" (=achieved) and "errechnet" (=calculated)? Yes, I agree. The authors of this report had full access to trial data. More informations such as displacement and water depth of the trials are needed to attempt to reconstruc...

There are three different speeds given for these two ships. One design speed for RICHELIEU and BISMARCK each and another speed, which has the designation " erreicht " which has to be translated with " achieved [in trials] ". There is no "erreicht" / trial speed given f...