Warbird Information Exchange

Slightly off topic -- The wreck of the USS Nevada, which was scuttled after the Bikini tests has been found.

Interesting to see if they find the New York and Pennsylvanian, both also lost for the past 70 years.

As a trivia question, the USS Nevada, after being sunk at Pearl Harbor, was rewired using solid silver instead of copper

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... arbor.html

OK I gotta ask where you got the “trivia” about it being rewired using silver wire. Aside from the crushing expense to do that to one ship what benefit would you gain. I can see wire connections using silver solder to join copper wire as it is superior to common solder for vibration resistance. I read thru the link and also looked up the USS Nevada and found no reference to the silver wire.

My understanding was that silver bars were used for bus bars in the electrical system, not wiring. And I thought that was the USS Pennsylvania, not the Nevada.


EDIT: I was wrong, it was the Nevada and not the Pennsy, but it was bus bars, not wiring. The silver was used due to the shortage of copper ingots. I wonder if they were removed before Bikini, or went down with the ship?

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Had God intended for man to fly behind inline engines, Pratt & Whitney would have made them.

CB

http://www.angelfire.com/dc/jinxx1/Desrt_Wings.html

The silver service set from the USS Nevada is on display at the NV State Museum inside the former Carson City Mint. Pretty nice set.

Some great wrecks from WW2 have been found in the past 3 or 4 years. Kool stuff. Is that an overturned tank I am seeing on the ship??

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Ain't no sunshine when she's gone!

I wonder if its still radioactive??

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Ain't no sunshine when she's gone!

Pat Carry wrote:



Radioactivity can be measured at ridiculously low levels, so yes, the Nevada is radioactive. But is the Nevada more radioactive - per weight or volume of material - than the bricks in a standard American home? Probably not!

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Kevin McCartney

Yes, it is a tank. A preproduction T26E-3 Pershing, or early M26 Pershing. There were several vehicles aboard the large ships during the Bikini tests.

_________________
Had God intended for man to fly behind inline engines, Pratt & Whitney would have made them.

CB

http://www.angelfire.com/dc/jinxx1/Desrt_Wings.html

Interesting that her red paint seems to have faded -

For those not understanding, the USS Nevada was painted bright red so she would be the bullseye on the Alpha tests.

BWT, when Dave's Dream dropped the Atomic Bomb, Like the Tibbets crew, they missed the target by 1/4 ~ 1/2 mile, but I guess in atomic warfair, being close is good enough

I believe the theory put forth by engineers is that the "miss" was caused by some of the baffles in the fins breaking loose and changing the drop characteristics of the bomb.

_________________
Had God intended for man to fly behind inline engines, Pratt & Whitney would have made them.

CB

http://www.angelfire.com/dc/jinxx1/Desrt_Wings.html

I have to wonder about the source for this claim as well. The only online reference I can find is a similarly unattributed statement on a different discussion board. Perhaps there's primary documentation that has yet to be digitized, but that seems unlikely. It makes little sense that out of the six battleships refitted and returned to service after taking damage at Pearl Harbor, not to mention the 4 South Dakotas and 4 Iowas (plus at least a dozen cruisers, 3 Essex class carriers and numerous other ships, submarines and auxiliaries) then under construction, only one required substitution of silver for what should have been cheaper and more abundant copper. And that one ship just so happened to be named for the "Silver State?" Feels like an urban legend to me.

I first read the claim many years ago in print (long before the internet), but do not remember where. It could have been Sea Classics the first time. And my understanding was that due to the supposed substitution of silver for copper was due to an immediate shortage of copper at that period of time. Without locating the primary source it is left as an assertion, not a fact. I remember what a former sailor used to tell me often: "The difference between a fairy tale and a sea story is that a fairy tale begins with Once upon a time and a sea story starts with you ain't gonna believe this s&%t, but..."

_________________
Had God intended for man to fly behind inline engines, Pratt & Whitney would have made them.

CB

http://www.angelfire.com/dc/jinxx1/Desrt_Wings.html

There is a good history of the Nevada on youtube by the "History Guy":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Nvq9n_QUZY&t=215s

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Kevin McCartney

I find that theory had to believe, as the Silverplate crews did a lot of missions, dropping pumpkin shapes before the actual missions - one would think that after dropping 15 x shapes ++, somebody would have noticed a 1/2 miss from the target

"Although the basic Fat Man model "1561" worked properly, it was not a well designed weapon. Both it and Mk-III stockpile model (stockpiled in 1945) were aerodynamically unstable at high speeds, causing the weapon to wobble (a combined yaw and rapid rotation) during its drop - terminal velocity of the weapon was .9 to .95 Mach. To keep this to a minimum, during the war, drag plates were installed in the tail box to slow the weapon down. These plates were not always reliable, however, an example being the post-war Crossroads Able nuclear test. In this test it is believed one of the plates either collapsed or was lost in the drop. The resulting wobble caused the bomb to miss the target battleship by over 1,000 feet."

"following the war a major effort was made to rectify this problem. This effort involved extensive wind tunnel tests conducted by John Northrop of Flying Wing fame".

The above is on page 88 of Nuclear Weapons of the United States An Illustrated History by James N. Gibson, Schiffer Publishing, 1996. Yeah, it was known issue.

The resulting research was used to develop the Mark IV Fat Man, which had a conventional fin design.

_________________
Had God intended for man to fly behind inline engines, Pratt & Whitney would have made them.

CB

http://www.angelfire.com/dc/jinxx1/Desrt_Wings.html