Re: Probably not a ship you want to travel on ....


"Fred J. McCall" <fmccall@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
guy <guyswettenham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
:
:Part OT but is a destroyer a ship or a boat? Originally they were
:known as Torpedo Boat Destroyers, later shortened to Destroyer. As a
:TBD was basically an enlarged TB with more gunpower is a destroyer
:strictly speaking a boat?
:

No, destroyers were always ships. The things they destroy may be
'boats', but they are ships. Just like a tank destroyer is not a
tank, a torpedo boat destroyer is not a boat.

.....and to further Fred's elucidation of the matter, in some Continental
navies many of the original "Torpedo Boats" were designed to be carried
aboard large and armored cruisers and capital ships, reinforcing their
"boat" status.

One old source I have uses a different standard....that ships are
self-sustaining and boats are not, covering the original classification of
submarines as boats...the crews actually lived on the tender and messed
there whenever possible, also applicable to "torpedo boats", which operated
with a tender/mother ship.

I suspect that the real naval boat/ship argument boils down to the capacity
of a vessel to make regular ocean transits under conditions in which the
crew remains safe, mostly dry and regularly fed seated (even if fiddle
boards are required). During WWII, US "PT" boats were hauled about as deck
cargo, wisely considered as unlikely/unsuitable ocean crossers. Among the
Gator navy, once equipped with myriad types of ships and boats, the "line"
seems to have been the conditions under which a craft crossed the Atlantic
or Pacific, as deck cargo, a "boat", covering everything up to LCUs, the
real "U Boats", and in the USN Amphibs, everything with a "LC_", (as in
LCR(M)) and ships, crossing afloat, and designated with "LS_". That leaves
all the "A__" for argument, but ATFs are clarly ships, while PCs started as
clearly "craft", boats not ships, but by war's end had grown to cross the
line.

Then would come the debate over "gunboats", originally small craft for local
ops, but by the late 19th century grown to ocean growing, part of the tribe
that included "Colonial Sloops", most intended for foreign service, the
smallest vessel considered suitable for showing the flag to various
benighted (and less well equipped) heathens. Come WWII, the new "gunboats"
tended to be inmates of the amphibious zoo, shallow draft amphibious craft
hulls festooned with guns left over in depots or available from regunning of
escorts, etc..


:
:Even further OT does anyone else think the current 'destroyer' and
:'frigate' should be reversed?
:

They used to be in the United States. Way back when, we had DEs
(Destroyer Escort - basically an weaker destroyer intended mostly for
escort duties rather than more general missions), DDs (destroyers),
and DLGs. The DL came from 'Destroyer Leader', an oversized
destroyer, and they were referred to as 'Frigates'. Eventually the
DLGs were converted to CGs and called cruisers, as they probably
should have been from the beginning (but cruisers are expensive, so
the story goes that they called them DLGs because everyone knew
destroyers were small, relatively cheaper ships and they could be
gotten through budgeting that way). This left the 'frigate' name
unnused and the DEs became FFs and were called 'frigates' in
conformance with the then current European practice.

Confused yet? :-)

The original (pre-missile) DLs were lovely if not altogether useful ships,
too large and unhandy for most of the period's ASW evolutions, but with
modest superstructures and top hamper certainly the embodiment of what
"frigate" must have meant to observers two centuries before, as long and
sleek as any of the early "Light Cruisers", yet clearly real "warships".
They also represented a public revelation of the "Great 3"/70 Affair", in
which the USN, as it earlier had with the 1.1" AA, spent a lot of money
developing a weapons system near obsolete at deployment and largely
dysfunctional in operation.

TMO


.

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