Preserving a Ship's Legacy Without the Ship
In this episode we’re talking about some strategies to preserve ship’s stories and objects without the full vessel.
To support Battleship South Dakota Memorial:
To send Ryan a message on Facebook:
To support this channel and Battleship New Jersey, go to:
ENVÍO y DEVOLUCIÓN GRATIS – Gran colección de Camisetas de fútbol oficiales – Descubre camisetas de equipos y selecciones europeas en camisetasfutboleses.com.
Wearing my BB 57 T-shirt right now! It’s a must see for naval enthusiasts in the Midwest!
We need to develop anti grav generators to save her
He mentioned Alabama, wave!
What about refurbishing these ships for one last operation? They would be instrumental in occupying the islands of Ireland and Scotland. American global naval bases are needed to combat foreign incursion into our sphere of control.
I've been able to visit the South Dakota memorial. It's not quite as cool as seeing a full ship, but still really neat what they were able to do.
I also really enjoy these "museumy" episodes!
The supper structure and guns
A half dozen suggestions for preserving a navy ship's essence+history when you can no longer save the ship itself:
1) Start NOW, don't wait till a once-proud vessle is a sad rellic, things are falling apart, and you have only a year or two left before the ship is gone.
2) While you want to keep as many physical parts of the ship as possible, focus on the personal story/history/experiences/life/service/duties of the people who served aboard ship… and the things the ship was able to do because of those people. Give people 100yrs from now as much sense of real life of a US Navy sailor as possible… to understand the what HAPPENED in every part of the ship, and WHO the people were who served there.
3) Digitize the entire ship, as much as you can. This can include walk through 3D camera capture when available, or something like Lidar fed into 3D modeling/CAD-ish software if that is affordable in another decade. Tag/label/document every valve/pipe/knob/switch/fixture/machine/room/hatch/etc… I suspect some of the gaming companies can cooperate with you or help in this effort, just for the ability to use the data to improve their own simulation. Visitors to the virtual ship could zoom in/out of ship 3D-cad and go stand in any room, click/touch objects to get detailed description, maybe have VR headset experience, or just ask for narrated tour hilights.
You may be able to request USN release copies of the original blueprints and design documents, to give you extra details of the ship NOW, while the ship is still in decent shape, so you can organize that info and match details to the ship itself, rather than have people look through a digital/virtual replica of the ship, and ask 1000 questions that no longer can be answered because the steel ship is gone. Eventually, the VR tech may allow the museum ship to be out of mothballs/drydock, and have a near-live experience of the ship underway… calm seas, stormy sea, going into battle, home to port, etc.
4) See if you can get a list of 150 sailors' job/role/GQ on the ship… from XO to Boiler-tech, Cook to Captain, Machinists mate to midshipman, maint+electrical to damage/fire control, medical to steward, CIC/coms to grunt/skipe, logistics to laundry, brig to baker, mop pusher to map plotter…
Get name/job/rank of anyone who served on board. Contact as many living former sailor's as can be found to interview… ask permission to use name/likeness or ask family if they are OK with adding relative to "virtual crew"… recreate their role on board as much as you can… with "day in the life" descriptions… highlight, good points, drudge duties, funny stories, ports of call, battle station/GQ role, personal stories, who did you meet, what 10 notable things did you know, how did you live, where did you come from, what did you dream, how did you get here, etc… When you don't have permission to use name of a specific sailor for a rank/role, setup "Sam the Sailor" example profiles far each rank/role that include summary descriptions you create from docs/records to give your best representation of that role on ship.
In another 20yrs you may be able to have interactive "crew AI avitars" who give virtual tours for different parts of the ship, but have a collective wealth of knowledge about the ship's operation and history… so people who take the tour get a strong sense of what it was like to live/serve on board.
5) Plan ahead for the year when your ship hull is to be gone. Pick 20 rooms and areas that best represent the ship and can be recreated in a land museum. Bridge, CIC, boiler room, comms, mess hall, crews quarters, maybe a 50ft section of outer deck, AA gun station. Preserve the equipment in those areas as much as possible, and mount it on floor/walls/ceiling to give a tactile look/feel of what it was like to work in those spaces in the 1940s or 1980s. If possible, serve realistic ship board food, and let visitors sit through any training session/film you can dig up from archive. You may have museum staff or guest speakers show up in period uniform to talk about different aspects of the ship, or explain what people did in each of the 20 rooms you preserve.
6) Try to give a sense that while every USN sailor has specific responsibilities, the entire crew relies on each other, top to bottom, bow to stern… and every ship works together with the rest of their fleet, coordinated with mutual support. Seldom does one ship "go it alone" on patrol or to win a battle. (except some subs) For the surface fleet it is almost always a large group effort between many ship's. The Captain can't do every sailor's job, or even know all the details, but relies on him to do it dependably. The battleship+carrier can't do the job of supply ship's or all other ship's in the fleet, but still rely on each other.
Keep up on maintenance they last forever
The South Dakota memorial is great and is definitely an example to be emulated. It has the artifacts and historical displays of other memorials but it also gives visitors a full scale appreciation of the size of a battleship, I wish the English would do this for Rodney.
The BB South Dakota museum and memorial is here in Sioux Falls, SD. The exhibit includes the deck size marked out on the ground, turret and funnel locations and the topmast as the peak of the superstructure. You get a good feel for the horizontal size, but not the true mass of the 35000 ton vessel in three dimensions. The sub-surface volume and volume of the superstructure is not well represented. Yet for the 1960s, this was a novel concept that avoided moving such a large warship to a display on the banks of Missouri River in SD. That would have been a herculean feat to get this ship to be towed up the Mississippi/Missouri River network. Just the space and collections at the BB South Dakota memorial is still impressive, even though it's out in the weather down the hill from the VA Hospital in Sioux Falls.
That quad-40, the sailor art, all the CIWS since they are real ones.
If the museum organization ever goes broke during Ryan's lifetime, I already know in whose garden the ship is going to end up.
So Wise , Thank You . If all goes well there will be some form of Ar or Vr
You are being to pessimistic. Look across the river . The Olympia. Too many people love the ship to allow this to happen. And the same with the NJ .
I actually never been to South Dakota, let alone the South Dakota memorial, unfortunately. However, if I wanted to save at least one part of New Jersey, it would be the face of her bridge. No other battleship, American or otherwise, looks so good with that enclosed bridge. To me, that and the 16-inch guns are the staple of the Iowa-class. I'm definitely hoping New Jersey or any of the other battleships don't get dismantled in my lifetime at least.
Turrets ,helm, citadel, engine, radar,in short all her technology ,weapons systems, engineering spaces, at least one example living quarters, gally, the on board hospital, powder and shell handling , fire control , and damage control, main bridge, her flags and marks of identity, the flag quarters ,and the captains skiff( gig ?) And life boats, the helm sounding system and auxiliary control , . I know I've mentioned a large load yet I know I've missed much that's just as important even things like the ships dishes and coffee cups , things that were part of day to day life aboard that the crew interacted with. Engine room tools , many ships had machine shops on board to make repairs. I worked in a machine shop with a ball bearing leathe/ grinder from a German sub ,( fascinating to see in use ) .
Have you or other museums considered getting a full scan of the ships for VR or something similar? The technology exists and is getting cheaper.
Have visited the SD memorial and was very pleased. Didn't take long to realize why it hadn't been preserved there but they have done a very good job with the memorial.
I used to think the Battleship (South Dakota) Memorial was pretty underwhelming, but it's actually quite quaint and charming. A couple years back the docent described the Savo Island action and also explained how proximity fuses work. Most importantly it's a tasteful place to display the photos and artifacts of the crew that served aboard.
Some of the other comments are referencing a digital preservation. Maybe the museum could contact the people behind Titanic Honor and Glory. They are doing amazing work recreating a ship that that basically no longer exists. I wonder what they could do with a ship that is still around? I know Notre-Dame in Paris had a digital scan done and it's really helped them reconstruct after the fire.
I think some of the flag spaces where some of the major decisions of WWII were made should be saved
Do what they did with The Ark in Ky…A building made to look like a ship…inside and out.
Save the bridge and main turrets.
Corrosion is enemy number 1.
Nomination of Battleship South Dakota Memorial: done!
Seriously, Ryan, New Jersey can't pancake. She has belt armor – she'll wishbone long before she pancakes!
Just as long as she doesn't do it for many, many, many years to come!
Rust and dust doth corrupt I guess ?
helm and a turret and maybe the circuit wall
Ok I was partially mistaken. One of battleship Gneisinau’s turrets is being preserved, also a single-gun turret with the same model gun as Bismarck’s, both in Norway. Point is, definitely preserve on of New Jersey’s turrets! If Norway can do it, so can we.
Ryan, have you done a video about what the future of museum ships looks like? With so many nuclear powered vessels, it seems like eventually there will be no museum ships.
Preservation can be damn near indefinite if you have funding. Olympia is still afloat and she has certainly gone through decades of neglect.
It's a crime that a ship like, Enterprise, was scrapped, with all the history and major battles that she engaged in.
Excellent topic. My grandfather’s ship, USS Colorado BB-45 was scrapped of course and various items were taken off the ship. Always wondered the connection that her teak deck end up at Boeing in Washington . . . there must be a story there. Kinda sad that my home state only saved the ship’s bell. Too bad California didn’t see fit to save her namesake.
What about a digital recreation? Technology is only getting better, and in my mind the folks with Titanic Honor and Glory have already created a remarkable digital museum that keeps getting better with every update.
Also, these videos preserve a version of the ship, and I hope they are being backed up in some form outside of YouTube.
U-505 should last forever. All you need to do is overcome the gravity problem and put a roof on it.
Save any of the furnishings that would be reasonable. Set up accurate recreations of some of the crew spaces to give future generations some sense of what living on board was like.
What about 3d modeling of the ship or some type of 3d scans. Something along the the line of the project of titanic honor and glory. Where a user can walk in say virtual reality around the entire ship go room to room. VR has improved and is improving I believe its uses can be a breakthrough for historians and historical preservation. Even if something is gone think you could walk through the decks of long gone ships or view them as they were originally or even in use. New Jersey could model the firing of the big guns in action and while in VR you could watch the different crew in action in their roles in the turret in different locations.
The USS South Dakota Memorial in Sioux Falls is amazing. They preserved a ton. I think they even have an engine. 100% fire control room with a Tomahawk missle launcher just outside the door for BB-62
Absolutely a full turret
The physical artifacts are very important, however, I think measures need to be taken to record everything digitally. This should not only include copies and videos but literally a digital copy of the entire ship with the goal of allowing people in the future to take a virtual tour with as much accuracy and reality as possible.
I hadn't heard about Hiddensee. It's been years since I've been to Battleship Cove; I remember the ship being pretty underwhelming compared to the battleship. I guess that's why they decided to scrap it; it's absolutory not the draw there and spending the money to repair it would not help the core mission of the organization. Too bad though. It really does show that ships have a shelf life.
I'm sitting here watching Hunt for the Bismarck on Military Channel, comparing Hood to the USS Arizona explosion, has there ever been a study of which ship actually had the largest explosion?
I have seen the South Dakota Battleship memorial. It’s good that they did something. Definitely not the same as having the whole ship. I also visited Yorktown CV-10 and Battleship Alabama BB 60. I admired CV-41 Midway but didn’t get to tour it. I was also privileged to do 2 friends and family cruises on CVN-71 Theodore Roosevelt. My oldest daughter did 2 deployments on her. 1 on CVN-77 H. W. Bush.
The Russian submarine B-39 could have been heavy lifted and preserve on land, just like the German submarine U-505.
Love to see the pic of the submarine Albacore 569 …here in New Hampshire (Portsmouth) Has ryan & the BB62 crew been to see her ?