rshoker wrote:I put the above post up a couple a days ago when I got back from the BB-55 and did a quick post late at night. Below is a rewrite of the prior post that I am posting in several places with a few corrections to my original post.
Thanks for the post Randy, I waited to comment until after you made the correction.
Then Yesterday Ron dropped a bomb, he pointed me to a Nav history design sheet for BB-55 that Naval History has on their web site that says the colors are Black, 5-o and 5-L. I almost fell off my chair.
Is that what that noise over the phone was?
A close study of this Naval history design sheet shows a very similar pattern to what she actually wore. It is called Measure 32v.11 18-d. It seems very likely that the version the crew painted on at pearl was an attempt to follow this sheet.
Most ships don't match the design sheets 100%, crew jobs tend to differ more than yard jobs.
Ron�s excellent article in the most recent issue of the Nautical Research Guild also talks about the deck pattern of the first Measure 32, again it does not follow the design sheet exactly, but the photos show a deck pattern, at least prior to her 1944 repaint on the west coast.
Just looking at the photos on NHC and Navsource should have been enough to prove she had a deck pattern.
As for the repaint in 1944 she was most likely repainted black as the Navy Blue would not have covered the black as it faded, and late war photos of her in measure 32 don�t seem to show the kind of splotching that Navy blue painted over black would do as it faded.
Using prints from original negatives, not copy negs on Eastman Safety Film (not available until 1948, excellent detail rendition at the price of increased contrast......that's called in depth research kids) and comparing the tonal difference between the paint and boot top where it's well lit and still in Puget's yard area against other original negative prints of known Ms21 (5-N) and those boot tops (similar lighting conditions and still in the yard) BB-55 does not show near the contrast difference between boot topping and 5-N. Some of the Puget photos of BB-55 show the paint to be as dark or darker than the boot and the original negatives show the inverse, which agrees with the positive prints.
The deck pattern seems to be gone after her 1944 repaint although it still seems to be on turret roofs.
Decks and turrets roofs were usually painted after all the heavy yard work was done and the ship had made her post-refit trials and calibration runs. Once she's back in the fleet high angle shots are few and poor quality. It appears she got deck blue on her #1 & #2 mains with light grey on her #3 main but no pattern. Also the secondaries with the darkest color adjacent to the roof appear to have that color on the roofs, not deck blue and it applies to both the early and later version of the scheme.
I was wrong. Ron Smith was right. Nice detective work Ron...
Thanks! Now to get those as painted design sheets to you.
How do I get the pen to write here? Now my screen's all smeared with ink.........
Maybe I should of ordered the Kuznetsov instead.... 
