Field Trip to Battleship Cove Fall River M.A. Part 2

[@k5at]

Thanks for sharing the video. Great tour!

[@CompEdgeX2013]

Enjoyed the tour Greg. The machine room was excellent! I'd love to give some of those tools a good new home...LOL The hole through the 1.5? inch deck plate was pretty cool too. Colin

[@Dan.Whiteford]

Thanks for showing me around - most interesting videos.

[@pinchy08]

I've slept overnight on this battleship 3 times. You did a great job touring this WWII vessel. Your walking tour made me realize how much of the things I missed. Man there's lots of steps down. So far down your in the hull submerged underwater. Feels like I'm walking into a trap if I keep going down and down. But as long as we found a way down it will also be the way up and out. I grew up in Fall River MA. I hope to visit some family still living there. I'll include the battleship when I go.

[@Halligan142]

Yeah I have slept on it twice when I was a boy/cub scout

[@bobvines00]

At about 6:40 or so, you are walking around a cylindrical section of "wall." That is actually the armor around the base of the 16-inch guns and goes something like 5 or 6 decks down, well below the water line. I'm still amazed at what it took to build & operate (i.e., shoot) those big guns! Earlier in the video, when you were in the 16-inch gun turret looking at the sighting mechanisms, there should have been a large metal (cast iron/steel?) "box" or "cube" (several feet square) behind you, if memory serves, that was an analog computer used to determine how much to raise or lower the gun tubes to hit the target selected by the sighting mechanisms. (I'm basing some of this on visiting the USS Alabama in Mobile Bay years ago and some on a book my uncle had on Navy ordnance -- he was an officer in WW II.) I *think*, but am not positive, that the info from the sighting mechanisms had to be manually input into the analog computer, but, of course, that would have slowed things down, so maybe there is/was an electrical connection between the two units. The gun "cylinder" encloses the elevators bringing shells & powder bags up the be loaded. Obviously the shells & powder are _supposed_ to be stored separately, but when Sailors get in a hurry, sometimes they bring up too much stuff that goes boom. If they get hit directly in the cylinder and the hit penetrates in the wrong spot, then things get really unhappy. I really enjoyed your visit to Battleship Cove!

[@Halligan142]

Bob Vines Thanks! Somewhere in the video I go by the main fire control station in the ship. Basically a giant plotting room. This controlled all the rangefinders for the guns and it's my understanding that the guns could be automatically controlled by by these stations although they could also be controlled manually through the analog computers in the turrets themselves. These ships were a feat of engineering and all this was done in at a time where modern electronics as we know them didn't exist.

[@pierresgarage2687]

Ho Boy! That's like a floating city... I prefer the visiting than the serving on those steel monsters, must have been HELL for all those sailors during a battle run, a lot of the people that served have a few good memories, but also some horrible ones. I wish there were to be only peace time from there on...! It was a little fast but great visit, enough to want to see more. Thanks.

[@rchopp]

Thanks for the tour.

[@mce1919]

Thanks for sharing this, I want to go and see this.

[@krazziee2000]

thanks for the video. very cool.

[@TheAnasazi1]

Thanks for sharing!

[@ccg1171]

I went in there last summer I could hardly breath way down the stairs! It was cool in there though.

[@gizzo123us]

That was cool !!

[@12345NoNamesLeft]

21:13 Radial Arm Drill

[@12345NoNamesLeft]

20:50 Planer

[@craigsbully]

GREAT VIDEO!! Thanks for sharing this with us. I am definitely going to check this place out next summer. I can't believe the access they allow the patrons.