All Articles Tagged 'navy' (51)

Up in the Heavens, daring Devils bring Hell to Earth!  On and under the Seas Men of Iron in Ships of Steel duel for supremacy of the seas.

 Yes, those Gallant Knights of the Air in their Incredible Flying Aeroplanes!  The glory!  The romance!  The excitement!  Oh, and the old "die horribly in a fiery plummet after ripping apart…

It's time to tell a bit about the world's most unusual navy.

While we (OK, some of us) are looking forward for the third Boardwalk Empire season, it's good to learn something new - or rather,…

With all due respect to flying boats (actually, it's more than respect - it is love!), we cannot ignore their smart companions.

Between the two world wars, France built a variety of floatplanes, mostly for the Navy - fighters, bombers, recce, observation and anti-submarine craft, etc. Here are just a few. Hope these machines will…

When the radar existed only in science fiction but the aviation was already here, the most common way of spotting a distant target was to send a reconnaissance aircraft based aboard a battleship or a cruiser.

For submarine fleet, spotting and early warning was probably even more vital than for the large surface ships. No…

This Saturday, your Air Mail is brought here by an advanced experimental fighter, Buck Rogers at the controls*:

The Grumman G-34 proposal of 1938 for a single-seat twin-engined shipboard fighter anticipated the realization of an operational production example of such a type by quite a few…

Welcome to Knights of the Air, a weekly series on Dieselpunks spotlighting the aces and pioneering aerial technology of World War I.

From the moment the flying machine showed signs of military usefulness, navies of the world sought ways to employ airplanes at sea. In a 1910 experiment, American pilot Eugene Ely took off in a Curtiss biplane down a sloping ramp built above the foredeck of the cruiser USS Birmingham. The plane dipped so low that the…

To everyone who thought that airships are neglected here, I owe my most sincere apologies.

How could a universal symbol of Dieselpunk be neglected or even worse than that - ignored? And if we do not want to walk in circles around the Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg (well, it can take quite a lot of time, considering their size), let's remember another airship -…

Last week, we examined the birth of naval special warfare sabotage operations during World War I. Fast foreward to World War II and the British efforts to create a reliable weapon to be used by frogmen. The result, Mark 1/6 limpet mine.

Born as a crude knock-up of an idea, the Allied limpet mine would be…

From World War I through World War II, Italian Navy engineers were at the vanguard of special maritime operations. From the use of combat divers to the development of weapons, Italian naval expertise knew no rival in unconventional littoral combat. An example of their special warfare prowess started in the closing…

If only the looks could kill, these flying boats would be the deadliest things over the Atlantic.

In fact, they were obsolete before they could fly and led an unimpressive, even disappointing life. But the looks, oh!



The Saturday Air Mail presents: Breguet 730/731 flying boats. Their story is brought to us by …

During World War II, the Japanese Imperial Navy put to sea with a torpedo, the Type 93 known as the Long Lance, that was both hazardous to handle but extremely effective when put in the water. The nearly three ton torpedo sunk many an allied ship in the Pacific over the course of the war.

By…

I received a startling email this morning from Noella1B@aol.com. My first thought was to post it as a photo album, but it tells such…

Originally posted on my Steampunk blog: Nicholas L.…

Alternate universes and parallel words are full of weird warships. But reality is sometimes even more weird than fantasy.

One of the most popular althistoric concepts is the big-gun aircraft carrier. Such ships look good on paper or forum board: big enough to carry a heavy gun battery and substantial air wing, well-protected against enemy shelling and torpedo attacks, fast and…

To stay neutral, a nation needs strong defense. Especially if we talk of a former great sea power.

Sweden, a country that did not enter any war since 1814, was not immune from the naval arms race in the early 20th century. After the dissolving of the union with Norway in 1905, the situation was tense with the Russian Empire in the east, Germany south of the Baltic Sea, and Norway,…

WWII was a monoplanes' war... Was it really?

OK, I'm repeating myself. But the biplane in question wasn't mentioned in that old article / album. And it served until the end of the war - as a scout and trainer, floatplane and deck plane, - modest, elegant and reliable.

The SOC was designed mainly as a catapult-launched floatplane, flying from battleships for gunfire…

Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen were the largest ships of Finnish Navy.

During the early inter-war period, the Finnish Navy consisted of some 30 ex-Russian vessels. Most of these were old and in bad shape, and the types were not ideal for requirements of the navy as they mostly had been taken as war-trophies following the civil war. In 1925, a tragic incident highlighted the sorry state of the navy. An old torpedo boat was lost in a fierce storm,…

Have you ever heard of an Italian monitor?

Here's one, called by Rt. Hon. Sir Percival Poppycock, KCIE, Vice Commodore of the Royal Tasmanian Yacht Squadron "one of the ugliest warships ever" (I'm sure many of us would subscribe to this point of view). The monitor is the subject of enlightening article published @ cityofart.net, reproduced here with some minor additions from…

HNLMS De Ruyter was a light cruiser of the Royal Netherlands Navy, the only ship of her class.

She was originally designed as a 5000-ton ship with a lighter armament due to financial problems and the pacifist movement. Later in the design stage an extra gun turret was added and the armor was improved. Displacement was increased to 6545 ton (standard; 7500 full). She was the seventh ship of the Dutch Navy to be named after Admiral Michiel de Ruyter,…

Here is a story of an unusual and unlucky battleship class that failed to revive the Great Armada glory.

Of course the term "pocket battleship" was invented to label the German Deutschland class. But two lesser sea powers can claim the copyright: one of them is Greece with its ill-fated…