The Ironclads

That's a gorgeous image. I took the liberty of shrinking it a little so it would fit in the page. Hope you don't mind.

Mention of Verne made me think of the Thunder Child, the fictional ironclad torpedo ram of the Royal Navy, destroyed by Martian fighting machines in H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, while protecting a refugee rescue fleet of civilian vessels.

I suppose their mothers must have loved them. I have to say I like the Royal Navy's World War 1 monitors such as HMS Marshal Ney. Like all monitors, not much ship but lots of gun.

I think it would benefit us to see the image in both large and small.

Many of the biggest ass ships in WWII had wooden decks. So It was possible that they were sitting ducks to begin with as Billy Mitchell stqted

I'm sure (by own experiences) that wooden decks are only on warships to keep seamen busy cleaning them.

I was an expert mopper by the time I left that ship.

Our decks were not wood, but we mopped em all the time.

I really liked the photos above. Facscinating. Thanks.

The wooden decks farmer refers to were on the Essex and earlier class U.S. carriers. (I don't know of any others with wooden decks.) This was done because of their naturally high freeboard, and to keep the center of mass (gravity) below the volumetric (bouyancy) center to preserve roll stability.

The Royal Navy took a different approach with Arc Royal and other early carriers, outfitting them with steel flight decks. However this cost them in aircraft numbers and storage capacity for fuel and weapons.

The wooden flight deck carriers of the U.S. and Japanese navies were indeed vulnerable to dive bombing and aerial attack. The aviation gasoline used by the aircraft then didn't help either. Damage control measures were better developed and emphasized in the U.S. Navy than the Japanese, though they got better as the war progressed. I think their loss of three large aircraft carriers to USN dive bombers in ten minutes during the June 1942 Battle of Midway ( they were caught with thrir flight decks full of fuelled armed aircraft getting ready to launch) changed their attitudes.

Modern carriers have deep draft, high freeboards, high strength steel flight decks, lots of ballast & storage for high flash point aviation fuel and weapons and capacious hangar decks - along with compact, very flexible and responsive, high capacity nuclear powerplants.

Some nice pics in these archives:

Ironclads - the Floating Fortresses of the American Civil War

The first Ironclads 1859-1872

I think the turret gun, in addition to the iron cladding , made the new navies possible.

Battleships had teak decks until they roughened the surface of metal decks and(I guess) learned how to deGauss the metal so didnt set off the ammo by static charges.
Sinking metal decked boats wasnt a big deal, it only took a slight change in the armor piercing abilities of ordinance and bombs

I do recall that our battleships and large cruisers all had teak wood planking covering their armored steel decks, even thrrough the 1960s. As a midshipman on my first cruise in USS Canberra, a Baltimore class 8" gun cruiser, fitted with early surface to air missiles. Every morning we were mustered on the fantail with bare feet and roilled up trousers to "holystone" the wood decks (scraping the sand & saltwater covered decks with limestone).

so you apparently didnt learn something from a dam geologist eh?

I learn something from them every day. They certainly are an overbearing lot !

I spend a lot of time in our San Francisco office: the ratios of Engineers (good guys) to Geologists and Scientists (chemists, biologists, toxicologists, etc.) are 3:2:1. The bioloigists are all cheerful & upbeat, the chemists a bit dour and the geologists are .... well, .. geologists.

Actually I find geology fascinating, involving complex issues and new ways of thinking. However I will never admit that again.

Er... that was so that the ships didn't set off floating mines sensitive to the change in the Earth's magnetic field caused by an untreated ship's hull.

yeh that ws the primary reaso but static on board is a problem. I often had it in my engine room of my boat.Wed wear static lines when workingnear the e ans fuel lines (ven though it was diesel)

From one of Walter's links