Naval History Forums

Old North American systems used the so-called NTSC composite video frame rate of 29.97 frames per second. As many films were filmed at 24 frames per second, this made conversion difficult -- I know this from experience as I used to run a tele-cine chain, which converted film to television in what wa...

I would certainly share Herr Nilsson's skepticism about the speed of the film being presented. Internet sources do not pay much attention to this sort of thing as so long as the speed seems 'about right', we accept it as plausible. This represents a particular problem where one has, in effect, no ga...

Regarding armor protection, fsimon wrote: " I took this from the book "Battleship Bismarck- A Design and Operational History of William H.Garzke Jr., Robert O. Dulin Jr., and William Jurens (moderator of this forum), with James Cameron, page 43. There it says: "The conning tower roof ...

The post-torpedo steering issue represents sort of a perennial discussion, i.e. a kind of 'cyclic' question that will probably continue to come up at intervals until nobody really cares anymore, e.g. in the year 2122. As new people enter the forum, and participate in these sorts of discussions, this...

The article re the Hessen method is interesting enough, according to the drawings I have available here, greatly exaggerates the convergence of the propeller shafts, showing their intersection point, in his terminology the 'pivot point', inside the ship's hull. In reality, it appears to have been tw...

Harveyized armor was not around for very long, and was quickly replaced by more resistant armor types. One has to be very careful about this "20% inferiority" stuff. It seems to have originated some years ago as a relatively offhand comment, and has since become a meme. The differences, in...

Yup. That's it. Was originally translated by the U.S. government and published as ADA437233. The scan you sent is obviously from a hard-copy provided by the National Technical Information Service -- you can tell by the staple holes. Have one of these myself, purchased c. 1964. It cost, I think, $6.0...

Really an excellent book, though -- as it was published c. 1964 -- now a bit dated. When it WAS published, it did reveal a lot of information hitherto unavailable in unclassified sources. No need to pay huge prices for a copy. A bit of internet searching will reveal that it can be downloaded from se...

BuckBradley's comment is correct. In many cases the provenance of armor plating captured postwar was problematical, and in even ideal situations the 'zone of mixed results' where some projectiles penetrated where others did not was fairly high, so small numbers of tests on problematical plates could...

To the best of my knowledge, the last survivor of Bismarck passed on in 2018.

Bill Jurens

The definition of a battle cruiser -- more on conjugation later -- has become very muddled because it essentially changed over time. Originally, the battle-cruiser was seen to be in effect an oversize and faster battleship. Technical and financial difficulties meant that not very many, with the poss...

Regarding the 'hyping' of HMS Hood, one must remember that, at least to the best of my knowledge, she was for a long time physically the largest warship afloat, and a good deal of the 'hyping' probably stemmed from the British (and sometimes foreign) press, etc. This is somewhat like the situation w...

My gratitude and thanks to correspondents who have taken the time to elaborate, and greatly enhance, my initial reply to this thread. This additional detailed data may be revealing, at least to me. Few other nations went (or probably would have gone) to the trouble to fit things so perfectly to geom...

I just realized that I may not have actually answered your actual question, which had to do with the length of the plates rather than their width. The length of the plates along the surface varied from place to place due to hull curvature. At the ends of the armored box, the plates seem to have been...

The precise arrangement is quite complex, particularly as some plates were subject to double curvature due the requirements to match the shell profile, and one is therefore fighting with what amounts to a plate expansion. Basically, my documentation suggests that there were 54 plates in the lower be...