The Ship Model Forum

Thanks G-Opt -- was waiting for your reply :) I think that solves it -- so we can consider the "heavily riveted plating" as the "armor hanging plate". Very interesting. Thanks!

Here are a few images & some notes I found tonight...Harvested those Dewey drydock close-ups ~25-30 years ago.

The 1935 shot off California with FDR just happened to show the shape of that area well, I thought. Ditto the 1941 image at Cavite...

Hope these are of some interest.

That was called the 'armour-hanging plate', as I recall. Have some very good close-ups from [b]CA-30[/b], which I'll try to locate & post.

better view of the riveted plates. https://www.navsource.org/archives/04/031/0403155.jpg Closeup of USS Augusta (CA 31) berthed at Melbourne, Australia after arriving on 29 October 1934. Note aircraft catapults and plane handling facilities.
https://www.navsource.org/archives/04/031/04031.htm

[attachment=0]19-N-25173.jpeg[/attachment]

Good picture of Augusta after overhaul at Mare Island early 1941 added splinter protection, etc. before heading to the Atlantic. Enlarging this picture shows the plating well.

the hull plates above the armor belt is just covered with rivets which suggests to me is used to stiffen/reinforce that section of the hull.

That's right -- that area differs from the rest of the shell plating which is what raised questions for me originally. I wondered the same -- if it was meant as a method to help distribute the weight of the armor belt. I'm sure the answer is there somewhere, just not easily available online :)

[quote="FFG-7"]Guba, Ian is talking about this if I am correct circled in orange. that is not normal practice.[/quote]

Oh okay, didn't see that a first, had to zoom in. It looks to me for spreading the weight of the armor belt forward. Maybe there is one going back too...

Guba, Ian is talking about this if I am correct circled in orange. that is not normal practice.

It's not extra plating, it's how the ships were built back then. Plates overlapped and were riveted for the most part. That's how the Prairie was built. They aren't stiffeners, they are the "outside" of the hull plating, and the inside of the ship looked the same. The hull plating joints weren't "butt" joints, they were "lap" joints.

I had the same suspicion (additional plating on top of the shell plating). It is visible on all the Pensacolas, Northamptons, and Portlands. Thanks!

is extra plating possibly as a stiffener to strengthen that section of the hull from the 2nd deck to the main & upper decks as not shown in her Booklet of General Plans 1945. she had it since she was built as can be seen in this link.
https://www.navsource.org/archives/04/028/0402855.jpg The Christening and "Launching" of Louisville on 01 September 1930.
https://www.navsource.org/archives/04/028/04028.htm

General question for you all (as I'm not able to find anything on this topic) -- the Northampton, Pensacola, and Portland class cruisers all have a visible riveted section of plating above the main armor belt, with tapered ends fore and aft running upwards towards the main deck. What is the purpose of this plating? There is no mention of it in any of the armor tables or battle damage assessments of the damaged ships (Northampton and Chester). It appears as though all the shell plating above the main armor belt up to the main deck is part of a continuous section of riveted plating.

The plating section's ends are visible in this photo of Louisville off Mare Island: https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/our-collections/photography/numerical-list-of-images/nhhc-series/nh-series/19-N-26000/19-N-26545.html

The forward plating section is nicely visible in this additional photo of Louisville after refit at Mare Island as well: https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/our-collections/photography/numerical-list-of-images/nara-series/19-n/19-N-30000/19-N-30497.html

The battle damage assessment from Chester's torpedo hit in Oct 1942 does not mention anything beyond shell plating in this area, so I'm curious if this section was armor: https://ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/WarDamageReports/WarDamageReportCA27-CA36/PlateI.JPG

I've re-read the appropriate chapters of Friedman's US Cruisers and can't find anything about it either. I know this is a rather obscure topic so appreciate any insights!

[quote="G-Opt"]A fantastic resource for Asiatic Fleet history buffs. The tanker/oiler next to [b]CA-30[/b] & [b]DD-226[/b] is presumably [b]George G. Henry[/b].

Thx v. much[/quote]
Good spot on that, and glad to share!

A fantastic resource for Asiatic Fleet history buffs. The tanker/oiler next to [b]CA-30[/b] & [b]DD-226[/b] is presumably [b]George G. Henry[/b].

Thx v. much

Hey all. I was recently doing some research for a different project and came across a few more photos of the USS Houston that I had not seen before that I thought might be of interest on here.
https://territorystories.nt.gov.au/10070/933831
https://territorystories.nt.gov.au/10070/314862
https://territorystories.nt.gov.au/10070/933826
They need to be downloaded as a TIFF file to be properly viewed for some reason with that website. Of note the first photo, while grainy, shows the life raft placements on the aft and starboard of the ship, and the Peary is alongside the Houston in that third photo.

[quote="G-Opt"]The questions re [b]CA-30[/b]'s paintjob resurface every few years.

The more I look at it again & the more I think about it, I now wonder if this wasn't blast/fire damage. I still do not believe it was a deliberate camo paint scheme. I have some photos of [b]CA-30[/b] being repainted (well before Nov. 1941) and there's nothing resembling that, nor was there anything remotely like it in the Asiatic Fleet from the immediate prewar or NEI periods.[/quote]
I don't think that blast/fire damage could be responsible for that. That would have required the blast to manage to perfectly discolor the entire turret roof and 8 inch gun barrels the exact same color, or for a fire to have burned on the turret top and barrels at the same intensity for the same amount of time on both the turret and barrels, and that seems too unlikely for me to believe, fire usually doesn't behave like that, especially when it is unintentional. I don't see why that could not have been an addition to her camouflage during her November 1941 refit. It seems pretty clear to me that the turret top and barrels are the same color and the turret top even has the circles in the paint from the wear caused by the life rafts that were there. That wear to me indicates paint on the turret top (as that is consistent with how paint wears), and as the color on the barrels is the same color as the color of the turret roof, it seems to me that it is intentional paintwork on both the turret and the barrels.
Fire/blast damage does not fit that well, and that doesn't look like water to me, so I don't see what that could be other than intentional paint, especially as the 5 inch gun seems to have a similar pattern

The questions re [b]CA-30[/b]'s paintjob resurface every few years.

The more I look at it again & the more I think about it, I now wonder if this wasn't blast/fire damage. I still do not believe it was a deliberate camo paint scheme. I have some photos of [b]CA-30[/b] being repainted (well before Nov. 1941) and there's nothing resembling that, nor was there anything remotely like it in the Asiatic Fleet from the immediate prewar or NEI periods.

Also apologies if this was already posted earlier in the thread, but here's another image of the Houston showing her camouflage from 1942. Its certainly more grainy, but again shows the Measure 1ish (IIRC Cavite Naval Yard did their own variation of what the Pacific fleet was doing at the time) type camouflage Houston was wearing

[quote="G-Opt"]Right, she [i]was[/i] painted...prior to the war. During the war? Not too much evidence of that at all.
Wavy lines of paint on her gun barrels? Not quite convinced yet.

But, I never say never; it's not entirely impossible, and an energetic researcher might still turn up something solid.

There were a number of early scratch-built models of [b]CA-30[/b] (long before kits; the original builder's model had an especially remarkable history in its own right), and many survivors saw them over the years. I was lucky enough to be with some of them on a few of those occasions, and never heard anybody say, [i]"You know that's a beautiful model, but doggonit they forgot the wavy lines on the 8"gun barrels!"[/i]

This morning, I did locate one [b]CA-30 [/b] survivor's interview in which he recalled painting the ship, [i]"...including the deck,[u] just before the war[/u]--darker gray..."[/i]
In fact, he provided the original photo below to the Navy many years ago. [/quote]
First, sorry about the delay in responding, I've been a bit busy as of late. From everything I have heard, I do not believe that Houston was painted once the war started (aside from her decks being possibly painted blue, I don't have the source for that on me though). I'm pretty sure her quasi Measure 1 camouflage was added in November 1941 during her overhaul from everything that I have read, and she just carried that until her loss.

Also, with all due respect (and they deserve a lot of it!) to the survivors of Houston, I don't find their lack of recollection of the wavy camouflage on the guns very compelling evidence of the guns not having those wavy lines. Memory is unfortunately a more fluid thing than we like to admit at times, and its very easy to forget minor things like that, especially if you had been on the ship for a year or two and those wavy lines would have been added only 2-3 months before her loss. A great example of this is the shields on the 40mm Bofors on the De Ruyter. The the shields were added in December 1941, and when asked about them, the officer in charge of the 40mms denied the shields existed, until he was shown a photo of them which jogged his memory into remembering them. Thus, I would not be very surprised if a crewmember of the Houston, after three and a half years of horrific treatment as a POW and then several decades as a civilian, forgot a minor detail about the paint on the 8 inch gun barrels which they only had for a very short time. Obviously if there was no other information regarding this, I would certainly just go with whatever a crewmember said was the case, however, we have a photo in this case, and those don't change.

I suppose it could be water from the earlier rain you mentioned evaporating from the barrels causing that effect possibly. But I am unfamiliar with water ever evaporating off of a cylinder in such a consistent wavy pattern, and especially not to produce such a clear color change. Given it happens on both the 5 inch and 8 inch barrels, I'm still more inclined to think that is a purposeful thing, to the point I'm pretty convinced it is, though certainly I'm not going to say this is definitely 100% the case.


[quote] And I'm tossing in an image of LANGLEY survivors on WHIPPLE (Feb 27, '42) which shows that the AF four-pipers didn't have wavy lines on their tubes...but, what is more intriguing is that it appears the funnel is deliberately half-painted (?)
Had not been aware of that before, and I do not know what to make of it...

HTH[/quote] I'd rather not get side tracked on the 4 pipers as it is off topic on this thread, but I would be interested in continuing talking about this on the thread in calling all destroyer fans. The Asiatic fleet destroyers seem to have some interesting things going on in the photos (USS Stewart's camouflage pattern for an example) I have seen of them from the time, and I think that would be a good discussion to continue there. Great spot on that funnel by the way, I had never noticed that before, that's really interesting!