Nice Photo Tour of the Mikasa

[Minimalist]

A Japanese battleship/museum from the Russo-Japanese War.

https://www.cnet.com/news/japans-114-yea...ther-time/

The Japanese battleship Mikasa is the only surviving pre-dreadnought battleship in the world. It's 114 years old and a fascinating look into history. Here's a full tour.

[Thumpalumpacus]

On my phone right now, will view when I'm home. Thanks for the link.

Few years back, my son and I toured the USS Texas -- almost as old. I'll put up a couple of pics in the member photos thread if anyone is interested.

[abaris]

I sneak that in, since it fits the topic. We once were a seapower. And that's one of our Dreadnoughts, the Szent Istvan, still being presevered at the bottom of the Adriatic. Sunk 1918.



In many crappy documentaries about WWI or two, this footage is shown when talking about basically every battleship ever sunk. This footage is from the Szent Istvan, which happened to be filmed. I always keep facepalming when they talk about british ships being sunk by WWII german subs and showing this footage.



That's how they found him (Austro Hungarian ships always were male) some ten years ago.

[Minimalist]

That clip annoys the shit out of me too, Abs.

[abaris]

That clip annoys the shit out of me too, Abs.

Doesn't it? It's used at any given occasion without giving circumstances and how it came to be. It's filmed from another Dreadnought, the Prinz Eugen, which was tasked with towing the Szent Istvan to port. It sunk before they could manage, but thankfully only about 80 sailors out of a crew of over a thousand lost their lives.

[Minimalist]

Do you know why the guns were pointed port side but the ship rolled to starboard?

[abaris]

Do you know why the guns were pointed port side but the ship rolled to starboard?

Actually I do. They tried to counterweight the list. The Szent Istvan floated for quite some time before finally sinking and they were hoping to salvage it. It was sunk by an Italian torpedo boat, more or less ending the age of the battleship. A low end vessel sinking a high end battleship.

But wouldn't you want to know why virtually all WWI battleships had ram bows? It was because of an Austrian victory at sea. The battle of Lissa in 1866. Out of necessity, since the artillery wasn't up to scratch, a visionary admiral resorted to classical strategies of ramming the opponent. Virtually every navy in the world adapted the ram bow after that.

[account_inactive]

Interesting.

[Minimalist]

Very interesting.  Actually the Italians were pretty good at shit like that.  In 1941 they severely damaged two British battleships in Alexandria with limpet mines attached by frogmen.

[abaris]

Very interesting.  Actually the Italians were pretty good at shit like that.  In 1941 they severely damaged two British battleships in Alexandria with limpet mines attached by frogmen.

But they totally failed at Cap Matapan. For one because they didn't have any kind of radar, and secondly because, according to contemporary accounts, most of their sailors were drunk. The Italians may be the only nation not wanting to participate in WWII.

As far as the Motoscaffis in WWI go, Austrian commandos tried to capture one of them to reconstruct it. They were caught at the last mile. But on the other hand, our subs were better than the Italian ones. You may know the teary tale of the singing Trapp family. What's less known is that Georg Ritter von Trapp was one of the highest decorated submarine commanders in WWI.