Subject: SMML VOL 2994 Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 03:09:04 +1100 The Ship Modelling Mailing List (SMML) is proudly sponsored by SANDLE http//sandlehobbies.com For infomation on how to Post to SMML and Unsubscribe from SMML http//smmlonline.com/aboutsmml/rules.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- MODELLERS INDEX 1 Re MAC Ships 2 Re Force Z, Radars etc 3 Re Force Z, Radars etc 4 Re 1/72 Gato and other 1/72 kits 5 Re Repulse RDF and AA 6 Mac Ships & Stringbags! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TRADERS, ANNOUNCEMENTS & NOTICEBOARD INDEX 1 Re 1/72 Ship News and Questions 2 new card models ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- MODELLERS ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1) From RDChesneau@aol.com Subject Re MAC Ships >> Merchant aircraft carriers I've been following the discussion on the British MAC ships.There is a book on Ebay at the moment which has a photo that shows the relative size of the Fairey Swordfish aircraft compared to the decks they flew from. Good God Almighty, how did they ever do it? If you go to the ebay page, click on the smaller photo to the right and it will enlarge. << Paul I thought everybody knew that British carrier aviators were the best in the world? Rgds Roger ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) From "GRAHAM BOAK" Subject Re Force Z, Radars etc >> From Mr. Sweetman's statement about "Even had the vessels had 'All Singing All Dancing' defence systems & had the RAF been able to mount an effective air defence, these ships were doomed given the japanese propensity to kamikaze!" I must state some facts of that time period. << I'd too would like to state some facts of that time period. RAF or better yet FAA fighters would have been capable of breaking up the unescorted torpedo-bombers attacks, as indeed they did time and again in the Mediterranean and in the Arctic. Although it would be unreasonable to suggest that the Japanese would thus have had no success, gains would have been much reduced. It is by no means unlikely that one or more of the ships would have survived, at least this initial attack. The experience of other Japanese land-based bomber attacks on fighter-defended fleets at this time suggests that few of the attacking force would have. The kamikazes were two years later. Although suicide attacks were noted in the early stages of the Pacific War, mainly if not entirely from already dying pilots looking for an honourable way out, they were by no means commonplace at this stage. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) From "Harold Stockton" Subject Re Force Z, Radars etc There have been comments of "I am confused.." to "A monument to British Incompetence and Unpreparedness in South East Asia, paid for in the blood of Brave Men." , and where is the point in all of this? While trying to understand the minutia of details in the modeling od the Repulse, certain factors became known about the actual facts of the issue. In Tom Bower's book "THE PAPERCLIP CONSPIRACY, The Hunt for the Nazi Scientists" there were a number of factors that should be stated about the state of mind at the Admiralty as well as many other naval staffs. On page 17 of the just mentioned book there is the following statement "The atmosphere at the Admiralty Research Laboratory was pleasant and gentlemanly, but it was built on innumerable fallacies, none more perilous than the belief that 'if a ship's gun shot at an aircraft, the aircraft would continue to fly in a straight line.' . . . an irate air chief quipped that even if a bomb was to fall on a ship, the navy would nevertheless claim that the damage was caused by a mine. Bombing of ships had been unquestionably disapproved of since 1925, when the Admiralty stipulated that naval aircraft would never carry bombs weighing more than one hundred pounds. . . .Consequently, coastal command aircraft were not equipped with bomb sights, and depth charges were not adapted for use from aircraft." And this same mentality spilled over into the Air Ministry were the AW Whitley was condemed to a poor performance when its bomb-load was the same "one hundred pounds" and its wingspan limited to 100 feet in order to fit into existing RAF hangers. Other then current thoughts were in 1936 " '. . . because even one anti-aircraft gun in a merchant ship' would keep the aircraft at such a height that the chance of destruction was 'very small.' " Even though tests conducted that same year kept the destruction of a "Queen Bee" target survived a two and a half hour flight over the Home Fleet. The January 1939 report on the fleet's poor performance in 1936 concluded that "Two hits on every aircraft carrier and one on every cruiser may be expected for every aircraft hit . . . destroyers are virtually defenceless from air attack. . . . It is difficult for us to avoid the conclusion that the protection of merchant shipping from air attack is at present unsolved." Much faith was then being placed in the use of catapult-launched aircraft, CAM ships. But to be completely fair to the Admiralty we should take a look at what the USN's Bureau of Construction and Repair (BuC&R) thoughts on the design for the 1932 plans of the proposed USS Yorktown (CV-5). "There were BuC&R itself desired a rearrangement of the 5-inch battery to allow for an increased flight deck length (729 feet, as oppossed to the 708 feet as designed); three guns forward one onthe centerline, in a shallow 'well' at the bow, the other two forward disposed on the foc'sle deck, port and starboard the after guns were to be situated with one on the main deck level, on the centerline, the other four mounted just below the gallery deck, on sponsons, two on the port side, two on the starboard. In addition, BuOrd put forth a proposal that would give the ship four quadruple-mount 1.1-inch automatic guns, weapons designed specifically to counter the threat posed by dive-bombers." "One further change was made to the design in November 1933, when BuAer pushed for a still-longer flight deck (794 feet), by having all the 5-inch battery placed in sponsons, forward and aft, eliminating the centerline mounts. . . " In short, modern ships and their associated systems take considerable time to design, build and maintain. As I wrote earlier about the .30-inch "pop-guns" that were on the USS Yorktown, by the time of her commissioning these had been replaced by four .5-inch water-cooled single-mounts. During Yorktown's 29 November 1940 Pearl Harbor refit, (I think here) her Mk. XXXIII gun director was removed from the top of her island and it was replaced by the American CXAM radar. The four .5-inch water-cooled single-mounts were relocated from her foretop and relocated on the galley deck level at each corner of the flight deck. "While the British were building longwave radar systems, the Americans were pursuing similar technology in parallel, if in a much more leisurely fashion. . . . CXAM proved extremely useful. It included a switch to allow it to change its PRF, allowing an operator to detect ghost echoes. Switching the PRF did not change a return from a true target, but it did cause a ghost target to jump to a new position on the display. Later on, this feature also allowed CXAM to be used for secure communications. The switch was changed to a telegraph key, and two CXAMs could be used to trade Morse code messages over line-of-sight distances, with the narrow beam and relatively high frequencies making eavesdropping difficult. "CXAM would be refined into the excellent "SK" set by the addition of a rotating antenna and PPI, instead of an antenna directed by the operator onto targets for ranging by an A-scope. The SK, nicknamed the "Flying Bedspring" for the appearance of its antenna, was the US Navy's standard early-warning radar through World War II. The antenna featured a 6-by-6 square array of dipoles, 4.6 meters (15 feet) on a side. Peak power was 330 kW, an order of magnitude greater than its XAF ancestor, with a pulse width of 5 microseconds." "At a party hosted by Dr Alfred Loomis on 19 September 1940 at the Wardman Park Hotel the British (Tizard Mission) disclosed the technical details of the Chain Home early warning stations. The British thought the Americans did not have anything like this, but found it was virtually identical to the U.S. Navy's CXAM radar. The Americans then described their microwave research done by Loomis and Karl Compton earlier in 1940. The British realised that Bell Telephone Laboratories and General Electric both could contribute a lot to receiver technology. The Americans had showed a Navy experimental 10-centimeter radar but had to admit that it had not enough transmitter power and they were at a dead-end. Bowen and Cockcroft then revealed the cavity magnetron. This disclosure dispelled any tension left between the delegations and things then went smoothly." One wonders about the effective range of the RN's Type 284 ranging radar versus the Yorktown's CXAM's ability to "locate an opposing force in tactical evercises (October 1940) 'out of sight over the horizon, at a distance of 35,000 yards,' and helped the ship find her anchorage in a thick fog." But, then these are just details for a specific period of a ship's life. Harold Stockton ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) From John SLATER Subject Re 1/72 Gato and other 1/72 kits It is with amusement that comments hit the board about the large size of the Gato at 52 inches. Whilst I realise that this is big by comparision to the majority of plastic ship kits built as static models, as an exclusive 1/72 radio controlled scale modeller and ten year member of Task Force 72 www.taskforce72.org and the Subcommitte www.subcommittee.com the Gato size is fantastic for RC. Re size being big, the largest model in our club is the USS Enterprise CVN 65 and measures about 5 metres long. The Gato is but a puppy by contrast. I would really like to see Revell and other plastics manufacturers expand their 1/72 scale range in the future. 1/72 is a good scale for radio control, and allows in some ways, a more cost effective way into the hobby of remote controlled scale ships. A lot of our club members have started out by Radio controlling the Flower Class Corvette kit and then moved on to big and more expensive challenges. All the best John ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5) From Sanartjam@aol.com Subject Re Repulse RDF and AA Greetings, In an attempt to sum up, for her radar the Repulse certainly had a Type 284 gunnery radar on the forward director for her 15-in guns. She had no radar on either HA director, but did have a Type 286P air search radar mounted on the after end of the foretop. As WRPress has said, its antenna was like that of a Type 291 radar. For her AA, she had six 4-in AA guns (not to be confused with her nine 4-in LA guns), as well as four quad .5-in guns, the positions for which can be seen in the plan in Raven & Roberts' book on British Battleships in World War II. That she she still carried these guns is supported by the article in Warship International by A.E. Jacobs, which I presume Mr. Stockton has since his posts have quoted from it. The difficult question is the number of 20mm guns; I have seen the number listed from four to sixteen, but Mr. Jacobs (and I believe Admiral Hayes also) cites six and Jacobs at least seems to have been intimately familiar with her AA. As for their positions, I would go for the aftermost six positions shown in the plan in Raven & Roberts on British Battleships; they show two more in the forward superstructure, for a total of eight, but I wonder if the forward two were ever fitted. (The Raven & Roberts plan of the Repulse in "British Warships of the Second World War" shows many more 20mm guns and two fewer .5-in mounts, but I don't think that was the case.) Incidentally, the 5/38 gun carried by the Yorktown and many other USN ships in WWII was not a LA gun but a DP gun of great effectiveness; note the RN report on the 5/38 on the Delhi in Raven & Roberts' book on British Cruisers in WWII. 'nuff said?!? Art Nicholson ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6) From John Sweetman Subject Mac Ships & Stringbags! Dear Paul, They did it because they had to! However it brings to mind a tale I heard about the lads & lasses of a small airfield in Eire, who where so used to their tiny airstrip, that they thought nothing of flying and landing on postage stamps. However the "Stringbag" particularly when it was not flying with ordanance was so responsive and forgiving that it just about landed itself, It was so slow that there was plenty of time for flight adjustments, also tongue in cheek, "The more Guts than Brains, School of motoring!" Best Regards John Sweetman ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- TRADERS, ANNOUNCEMENTS & NOTICEBOARD ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1) From "John Snyder" Subject Re 1/72 Ship News and Questions White Ensign Models will be releasing a dedicated photoetch set for the Airfix 1/72 Severn-class RNLI Lifeboat. Best regards, John Snyder White Ensign Models http//WhiteEnsignModels.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) From "D.A. den Bakker" Subject new card models Saint Nicholas (our Dutch present-giver, December 5th) and Santa Claus (the international Christmas Day equivalent), and the long winter evenings are approaching fast - a good reason to visit my website www.zeistbouwplaten.nl once again to check for new models. Look for Zeist Bouwplaten (architecture), Paper Trade (ships, trains) and Scaldis (ships). The Collectors' Corner may also lead you to some unusual models (Alan Rose!). Don't postpone unusual models only come in one or two copies each. With early season's greetings, Diderick A. den Bakker ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Check out the SMML site for the List Rules, Reviews, Articles, Backissues, Member's models & Reference Pictures at http//smmlonline.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- End of Volume