HMS M.33 coastal bombardment vessel from Gallipoli campaign. Credit National Museum of the Royal Navy NMRN. Click to big up
M33 Wheel with Victory and Mary Rose in view
Stern 1848×1230
If you are in England and have a chance, swing by the HMS Victory and check out M33. This humble little monitor of 568 tons with a shallow draft allowing it to get close-in to shore and fire at targets on land, carried two powerful and oversize 6” guns, but was a basic metal box lacking in comforts. The 72 officers and men who sailed for the Gallipoli Campaign were crammed inside and away from home for over 3 years.
She then saw active service in Russia during the Allied Intervention in 1919, narrowly escaping staying there the rest of her life, then was brought back to England where she served the RN up until 1984 as a hulk and floating office space.
The National Museum of the Royal Navy (NMRN) and Hampshire County Council (HCC) have worked as partners to develop the £2.4m project to conserve, restore and interpret HMS M.33 With a grant of £1.8m from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) the ship will be made physically and intellectually open to all for the first time. The ship sits in No.1 Dock alongside HMS Victory in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, and uniquely visitors will start with a 20-foot descent into the bottom of the dock before stepping aboard.
Tests in adding a 24-pack of Hellfire missiles, guided by the Army’s Apache Longbow system, to thier LCS fleet seems to be moving forward rather well. Now don’t freak out, LCS is also supposed to get a real anti-shipping missile such as Harpoon or the really neat new Norwegian Naval Strike Missile (NSM) and the Hellfire is just supposed to batter small boat swarm attacks that are just aren’t worth wasting a 13 foot long over-the-horizon missile on. But we’ll see I guess
Integration of the Longbow Hellfire missile system, designated the Surface-to-Surface Missile Module (SSMM), will increase the lethality of the Navy’s fleet of littoral combat ships. The SSMM is expected to be fully integrated and ready to deploy on LCS missions in late 2017.
“This test was very successful and overall represents a big step forward in SSMM development for LCS,” said Capt. Casey Moton, LCS Mission Modules program manager.
Termed Guided Test Vehicle-1, the event was designed to specifically test the Longbow Hellfire launcher, the missile, and its seeker versus high speed maneuvering surface targets (HSMSTs). The HSMSTs served as surrogates for fast inshore attack craft that are a potential threat to Navy ships worldwide.
During the mid-June tests off the coast of Virginia, the modified Longbow Hellfire missiles successfully destroyed a series of maneuvering small boat targets. The system “hit” seven of eight targets engaged, with the lone miss attributed to a target issue not related to the missile’s capability. The shots were launched from the Navy’s research vessel Relentless.
The test scenarios included hitting targets at both maximum and minimum missile ranges. After a stationary target was engaged, subsequent targets, conducting serpentine maneuvers were engaged. The tests culminated in a three-target “raid” scenario. During this scenario all missiles from a three-shot “ripple fire” response struck their individual targets.
Integration of the “fire-and-forget” Longbow Hellfire missile on LCS represents the next evolution in capability being developed for inclusion in the Increment 3 version of the surface warfare mission package for LCS. When fully integrated and tested, each 24-shot missile module will bring added firepower to complement the LCS’s existing 57mm gun, SEARAM missiles and armed MH-60 Sea Hawk helicopter.
You may remember a few months back when the Swedish coastal artillery and naval forces went ape shit on a possible non-NATO (read= Russki) midget sub in their territorial waters– and reportedly dropped a good number of ASW weapons on active contacts. Well, it seems like they have found a 20m (66 foot) long 3m (10 foot) abeam submarine in their waters with Cyrillic letters on its hull.
Note the groovy Steampunk hatch
As reported by The Express, a Swedish newspaper, the submarine is just under two miles off the coast of Sweden, although Ocean X, the team that discovered it, are not disclosing its exact location.
It was discovered last week, and the Swedish armed forces confirmed to the paper that the images of the craft are currently being analyzed.
Electric Boat built the Fulton (renamed the Som/Catfish) in the U.S. then disassembled her in 1904 and shipped the craft to Russia
They feel it could be the old Tsarist Navy’s Som, the 66-foot long, 11-foot abeam craft built originally as the private submarine Fulton by the Electric Boat Company in 1901 and sold to the Tsar during the Russo-Japanese war.
Som at dock. Note the Cyrillic letters on her hull (big up)
Som ensnared in fishing nets, DOH! Note the Cyrillic on the hull (Click to big up)
The humble Som was lost in the Baltic in 1916 but her grave has been lost to history.
Either way, its going to be interesting to find out just which one it is.
HMS Mersey is not an impressive warship. The 261-foot River-class OPV is slow, armed with just three guns all under 20mm in caliber, and is tasked primarily with coast guard style missions. However, last week she pulled off something that could revolutionize how drones are used at sea in the next generation.
You see she launched a UAV that was made from 3D printed parts.
FIRST LAUNCH OF 3D PRINTED UMANED AERIAL VEHICLE – 21/7/15 Today, 21st July 2015, a 3D printed Umaned Aerial Vehicle was launched from a Royal Navy warship for the first time. HMS Mersey provided the perfect platform for the University of Southampton to test out their SULSA unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Weighing 3kg and measuring 1.5m the airframe was created on a 3D printer using laser sintered nylon and catapulted off HMS Mersey into the Wyke Regis Training Facility in Weymouth, before landing on Chesil Beach.The flight, which covered roughly 500 metres, lasted less than few minutes but demonstrated the potential use of small lightweight UAVs, which can be easily launched at sea, in a maritime environment. The aircraft carried a small video camera to record its flight and Southampton researchers monitored the flight from their UAV control van with its on-board video-cameras.Known as Project Triangle the capability demonstration was led by Southampton researchers, making use of the coastal patrol and fisheries protection ship.With a wingspan of nearly 1.5 metres, the UAV being trialled has a cruise speed of 50kts (58mph) but can fly almost silently.The aircraft is printed in four major parts and can be assembled without the use of any tools. MOD Crown Copyright
The 7-pound Sulsa with its 5-foot wingspan can make 100 knots and was assembled on the ship with its body and wings made via 3D desktop printer and a prepackaged battery, control electronics, propeller, and motor.
The Sulsa can be printed for just a few thousand dollars, says Jim Scanlan, a professor at Southampton who works on the craft design. He concedes that it can fly for only 40 minutes. But that could be enough for missions such as responding to reports of piracy, where being able to easily check out a vessel from a distance of 10 miles or so is valuable. “If they shoot at it, who cares? You send another one up,” says Scanlan.
He envisages ships putting out to sea carrying printed parts to make up to 50 drones as well as a 3-D printer and the powder feedstock needed to print spares or bespoke vehicles for different missions, which might require different sensors. However, work remains to be done to prove that printing planes at sea makes sense. Printing the parts for a Sulsa takes hours, and existing printers would need to be modified so they could stay level at sea.
COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. (July 25, 2015) Secretary of the Navy (SECNAV) Ray Mabus delivers remarks during the National Baseball Hall of Fame Induction Weekend. During his speech Mabus announced the name of the future Freedom-class littoral combat ship (LCS 23) as USS Cooperstown. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Armando Gonzales/Released)
Well, seeing as most large ships in the 19th and 20th century fielded baseball or softball teams and the National Baseball Hall of Fame has 64 service members– many from the Navy in its annuals, the move to name LCS 23 as USS Cooperstown, announced last week, makes sense.
It will be the first ship in naval service named after historic Cooperstown, New York, which dates back to 1785 and is the county seat of Otsego County. And of course, it is the hometown of Maj. Gen Abner Doubleday (USMA 1842), Civil War officer and the grudgingly accepted inventor of America’s pastime.
Of note, in World War II, the United States liberty ship SS Abner Doubleday (Maritime Commission hull number 598) was named in his honor.
150715-N-ZZ999-001 SAVANNAH, Ga. (July 15, 2015) Navy Diver 1st Class Spencer Puett of Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit 2, who is the current Military Diver of the Year, and Lt.j.g. Andrew Heckel of Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit 6, pose behind the cannon they rigged for recovery this morning from the wreck site of the Civil War ironclad CSS Georgia, which has rested at the bottom of the Savannah River for over 150 years. (U.S. Navy photo by Chief Warrant Officer 3 Jason Potts/Released)
HMS Explorer (P164), HMS Pursuer (P273), HMS Biter (P270) on summer deployment to the baltics. MOD photo. Click to bigup
The Royal Navy has 16 Archer-class (or P2000) patrol boats. These 68-footers are simple, diesel-powered craft originally built in the 1980s as training tenders for the Royal Naval Reserve (RNR), University Royal Naval Units (URNU) and the now-defunct Royal Naval Auxiliary Service (RNXS). Today they make up 1st Patrol Boat Squadron based at HMNB Portsmouth.
While they have served on Cyprus patrol (2003-2010) and two units escort HM’s submarines in and out of port as part of the Faslane Patrol Boat Squadron, they are generally unarmed though they can mount a 30mm main gun forward and as many as four smaller mounts if needed.
The Confederate ironclad CSS Georgia was a seldom-seen 250-foot locomotive powered ram built by subscription from the Ladies’ Gunboat Association of Savannah in 1862-63. She haunted the river systems around that Peachtree State town, never firing a shot in battle, until the night of 21 Dec. 1864 when she was fired to prevent her from falling into Sherman’s hands.
Ah the fakery
She made news last year when a man disclosed that the only known photo of her in existence was faked back in 1986.
It appears that Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit (MDSU) 2 and Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit (EODMU) 6, working alongside the Naval History and Heritage Command, have had their hands full with UXO.
“We have already recovered upwards of 100 pieces of unexploded ordnance and discarded military munitions from the river bottom,” said Chief Warrant Officer Jason Potts, on-scene diving and salvage commander. “Once this portion is wrapped up, we can move on to cannon recovery and large artifact removal.”
Here’s some B-roll for you:
SAVANNAH, Ga. (July 11, 2015) Navy Divers from Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit (MDSU) 2 and Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technicians from Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit (EODMU) 6, in conjunction with archaeologists, conservationists, Naval History and Heritage Command, and the US Army Corps of Engineers, are diving the Savannah river in support of the salvage of Civil War Ironclad CSS Georgia. (U.S. Navy video by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Jesse A. Hyatt/Released)
Swimmer Deliver Vehicles (SDVs) are the unsung heroes of littoral covert naval action. Its that “covert” part that keeps them that way. News of them rarely eeks out and when it does its normally bad as most of the “good” stuff is classified.
Well about that.
HII recently put out a presser on their prototype Proteus dual-mode underwater vehicle (DMUV). That’s a submersible able to operate as a conventional manned swimmer delivery vehicle (SDV) and as an unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV), which gives the warfighter a bunch of neato options that the old X-boat and Chariot drivers of WWII would have loved.
The news is that two females, Chloe Mallet, an ocean engineer, and Andrea Raff, a mechanical engineer, have now been certed to drive Proteus.
Mallet and Raff are the only two women on the seven-person dive team that works with Proteus.
When in use in the manned mode, the vehicle is flooded with water and can submerge to depths up to 150 feet, weighs 8,240 pounds, is 25.8 feet long (the Navy’s DSS has an inside dimension of 26 feet) can carry almost 2-tons of cargo and uses a 300kHz Multi-Beam Sonar to keep her steady and away from undersea collisions while traveling at 10 knots.
So if you are around Panama City where all the small boat secret squirrels live, and see a 25.8 foot whale in the water, now you know.
.
PHOTO CURTESY OF SEASHEPHERD.ORG — Japanese Whaling Vessel Kaiko Maru Confronted by Sea Shepherd 12 February 2007
Farley McGill Mowat* was a Canadian novelist and a pretty good one. Odds are you may have read People of the Deer or Never Cry Wolf (which was made into a film in the 1980s that wasn’t all that bad a retelling). His non-fiction account of the HMS Frisky/ salvage tug Franklin, The Grey Seas Under, is one of the best ship tales ever written.
If you come across a used copy at a great price, pick it up.
Mowat also chipped in a fair amount of bread late in life to the Sea Shepherd anti-whaling fleet of piratical environmentalists and the group repaid the honor by naming a couple of their “Neptune’s Navy” patrol ships after him. The most current is the formerUSCGC Pea Island (WPB-1347), bought by the group earlier this year. (Somewhere a Coastie CPO is twitching.)
The first Mowat, however, was a 172-foot (650-ton) Norwegian fisheries research and enforcement trawler who started her career as the R/V Johan Hjort in 1956. The Norwegians laid the old girl up after 40 years of hard times in the Arctic and Barents Seas and the S/S group picked her up for a song.
In service to the pirates she carried the moniker Sea Sherpherd III, the Ocean Warrior, then finally Farley Mowat as well as a number of various groovy paint jobs as she shuttled her port of registry at least four times in her 12 year career as a hooligan afloat, conducting 100 cruises for the group all over the world. (Images via Shipspotter et.al.)
Well in 2008 the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans seized the S/S flagship over Fisheries Act violations during the seal hunt off the west coast of Newfoundland and she sat tied up at dock for a year when Ottawa ordered her sold at auction, where she brought just C$5000. A breaker picked her up and she apparently changed hands again to a group looking to put her back in the oceanography game in 2011, which never materialized and she sank at her moorings in Nova Scotia last week while being scrapped.
The scrapper owes some C$14,000 in dock fees on her and she is leaking oil.
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, for the most part, has expressed delight its former flagship has become an administrative headache for marine and municipal authorities.
“Farley would be smiling to know that the ship that bears his name continues to be an annoying irritation for Canadian authorities,” wrote Sea Shepherd’s founder, Paul Watson, in a 2014 social media post.
However, Watson has since claimed his plan all along was to have the ship seized by Canadian authorities, arguing that it was cheaper than paying to have the Farley Mowat decommissioned.
“The retirement didn’t cost Sea Shepherd a dime and for that we thank the Canadian government,” wrote Sea Shepherd member Alex Cornelissen in a 2008 post to the group’s website.
*(As a sidebar, Mowat was a subaltern in the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment during WWII and helped bring back tons of captured German kit for museum use all over Canada after 1945, so when in the Great North and you see something heavy and Teutonic on display, thank Farley)
