USS Olympia - From Cali to Philly via Manila

foreign so April 2022 was of course the tour of U.S Museum ships or at least the first one and after a rather long drive from Battleship Cove we ended up on the state border between Philadelphia and New Jersey and since we come down the I-95 instead of the 295 that meant our first Port of Call was this wonderful vessel which I'm sure most of you recognize as USS Olympia and as we walked around to find how you access the ship I was gratified to notice the Bolivian Navy had sent a representative but we made our way around and on a rather wonderfully sunny day as most of our days to be fair during the April tour were we decided to go aboard now before I start rolling the video that we recorded Please be aware I don't know quite what it was about this particular area the river but there seemed to be an unusual amount of electromagnetic interference that we didn't encounter on any other Museum ships and as I was using a radio mic at the time some parts of some of the video recordings have little bursts of static or very short silent sections I apologize I can't do anything about that there is no audio in those sections fortunately they are very brief and not very common and you know there was no way to tell at the time that this was happening because you play through the first 10 20 seconds of your recording and it sounds fine and then once you get editing you discover that you know a minute and two in there's a short static burst if anyone who lives in the area happens to to know anything about extremely high electromagnetic activity along this section of the Philadelphia New Jersey border please let me know and uh well let's just say I'll be using a wired mic if I go back to this area nonetheless let's climb aboard so on this fine day we find ourselves aboard USS Olympia now where am I you might ask because you know there's not a lot of ship in the background well this is the port wing of the bridge and right below and behind there's one of the larger casement mounted guns this is about the highest point on the ship that you can get without climbing ladders fighting tops tops of funnels and that kind of thing Searchlight position just forward there is of course the Wheelhouse just behind where you would steer the ship and it's the highest sheltered position in the entire ship we are of course here on the east side of Philadelphia where she is moored currently there's another couple of casement mounted weapons just beneath us here because they're much larger go down and have a look at a bit later and other smaller weapon just above it us obviously going in for its stacked weapons already but you can probably see from here and maybe if not you'll see when we get down there as well that's not a casement weapon the top one because it is an open Mount one of the defining features of a casement is that it is fully enclosed to at least theoretically provide some protection now if we look forward you can see one half of the business end of the ship so obviously this is the bow and that is a pair of eight inch guns normally you'd find a pair of tinch guns or indeed obviously because that's the bow turret you've got the off turret as well so you have four eight inch guns this kind of armament would normally be associated with an armored Cruiser in the time period the Olympia is built which is the 1890s now the thing about Olympia is that she's built in an era when the U.S Navy is trying to get up to any appreciable size after about two decades of cuts following the American Civil War so they can't afford to build massive numbers of ships but what they are looking for is initially at least a Navy following the jean ecol pattern I.E it's a few years before their idea for the massive battle Fleet that doesn't quite come off either but they're really looking into Commerce railing and so Olympia despite being a protected Cruiser has an Armament that's on a par with some of the better armored Cruisers which kind of The Next Step Up although not quite her Armament is within shouting distance of some of the smaller battleships so USS Maine under construction around about the same time as Olympia is kind of maybe a second class Battleship most people write her as an army she has two pairs of 10-inch guns so not that much bigger than olympias and of course Texas which most people classifies America's first attempt at a battleship that's the 19th century Texas not the Dreadnought that's currently down in the namesake state that had two 12-inch guns so four eight inch guns two 12-inch guns and then of course you have to remember at the same time the Germans are building pre-dread not battleships that have four 9.4 inch guns so as I said Olympia's just the fraction below Battleship level of armament but definitely well within the punch and power of an armored Cruiser when she is in fact a protected crew which is both smaller and protected Cruisers aren't just a size thing because there are some really big protected Cruisers it's also to do with the way the ship yeah her main protection is a protected deck and the reason that she has this very heavy Armament and the reason she looks a lot more modern than most protected Cruisers of the 1890s tend to have an awful lot of wing mount plus four and a half guns up to roughly the same caliber for an aft guns and admittedly she has Wing mounted guns as well but they tend they tend to be a little bit larger a little bit more numerous is because she's designed as a Commerce Raider following up on that Junior Colbert I mentioned earlier because the US Navy realizes in the 1890s there's no way they can take on a major opposing battle Fleet and win and so they plan to go after the enemy supply lines the problem is obviously the Emmy supply lines will be guarded by enemy Cruisers so if you send out a cruiser that has similar capabilities excuse me so if you send out a cruiser that has similar capabilities to the enemy Cruisers you might win you might not but even if you do win unless it's uh very very lucky engagement chances are your Cruiser will have to head home after that fight thing Olympia is built to beat city than almost any other protected Cruiser of the time period and certainly back to Cruisers that are most likely to be put on merchant ship escort or Convoy escort Duty so the idea is that you can come in she can completely overwhelm any of the escorts destroy the Convoy or destroy the individual ship depending on what she finds and still have enough protection enough Firepower enough endurance to be able to go on and repeat the process over and over again now unfortunately for those who like the design which need to be fair includes myself right about the time that she's under construction the US Navy changes its Outlook and decides it is actually going to go in the end for something more closely resembling a conventional battle Fleet and so the Cruisers which was intended is curtailed at just the one ship so Olympia is the only one of our type School Cruisers that will be built after slightly larger numbers thus forming a decent Fleet screen whilst Olympia kind of bereft of her originally intended Commerce rating Mission ends up mostly as a flagship for detachments of U.S Navy vessels elsewhere which is of course what she does in the Spanish-American War which we'll discuss a bit later but before we head on down and have a look at some of the other parts of the ship just have a quick pan across and you can see just how crowded even though this ship has no radar minimal Fire Control capabilities Etc when she's built she has some Searchlight platforms but you can see she's got lots of intakes which Supply the boiler rooms which Supply obviously the end also you can see all of these buff racks that are all over the ship these are what supporting the ship's boats and you can see some of the davits and arms that would let them lower so when she's cruising around normally there'll be lots of boats over here the deck would be a little bit more shaded a bit more and obviously you can see the upper deck here also is the hull which has been built up around it for the most part the stern and the bow not so much but at least a midship you've got some Splinter protection and let's head on down so before we just before we head on down just another bit of the forward part of the bridge here a few other bits to know obviously here's our way of telling the engine room how fast we want to go we have stop we have back one third two thirds Full Ahead one third two thirds standard which is our standard speed forward and then full which is pull out all the stops obviously this and this have a kind of parted company a little bit hang on a minute no okay well that'll need to be fixed at some point um so this is your engine indicator there's another one over there just in case you know whatever orders need to be given you don't have to run across the bridge and of course we have the ship's Compass which is important especially in this area because bear in mind the ship's Compass dead reckoning sextants Etc that is still the only way of navigating the ship there's no GPS there's not even any radio navigation at the time that she's built that would come in about 20 years later in a big way but compass in there sheltered from the elements and of course these two because the ship is made of steel so this much ferrous metal near a magnetic compass that's just going to go nuts this makes sure that the compass is actually pointing in the right direction and just in front this kind of oblong thing just after of the forward turret this is the ship's conning Tower most of you probably know my feelings on conning Tails already but this one has at least some practical value which we'll go down and see in a minute and just in case you're wondering before we head down this is what the interior of that little sheltered searing position looks like there's another Compass there but as you can tell whilst it's good for keeping you safe from the weather there's also another dial just there on the left so you can give instructions to the engine room well it is made of wood so I wouldn't necessarily want to be in that position during a battle because well it's going to be Splinter Central isn't it so we've come down one level from the bridge we're not actually on the upper deck this is basically built on top of the superstructure but it contains so for example we're now aft of the funnels we're in a little bit of a sheltered area above us is a secondary flying deck so as with many U.S ships there is a huge amount of redundancy built in obviously if something happened forward then you can still see a relatively decent distance from here but this is a breach loading six-pack gun one of the smallest guns on the ship says it's a Mark II and it's gun number 198 and compared to some of the other ships that you will have seen from the US tour well it's not exactly the world's most complicated weapon there's no Hydraulics there's no power ramming there's no shell hoists it's literally gun and well this isn't really a tripod what is it one two three four five six seven eight so it's a octa potted mounted pounder still has its breached there the one just over on the starboard side doesn't and this is really an anti-torpedo boat weapon I mean it looks big and scary and indeed you really don't want to be on the other end of it torpedo boats which at this time are sub 1000 tons and you know covered with highly explosive Torpedoes and have basically tin plate for armor that these at least at this point before they become torpedo boat destroyers and then destroyers and there's in this case tertiary and later on in other ships secondary batteries have to upgrade but for the moment this is a perfectly good weapon it's mounted high in the ship so that the Gunners can ideally fire down on an incoming torpedo boat which will do more damage and as you can see it's got this little uh opening which is why this is a Mount not a casement and this gives you your field of fire so this is why there are multiple of these and not only just to increase the chances of hitting something because more greatest chances of a hit especially an era before range finders Fire Control plotting Etc which you'll also notice there's no rangefinding equipment here there is literally an iron sight on the gun and you would just have to play this back and forth so at the moment city cruises Spirit of Philadelphia just coming past the guns open Mount right now would be a warning shot and now property down is getting quite extensive so as you can see we can bear maybe 20 25 degrees forward of the uh broadside but they're considerably greater swing to the point if you get actually do get this thing off you're probably well over 50 55 degrees pointing aft now this is reasonable amounts of metal I mean it's it's a bit more than Splinter proof it'll at long range this stuff might stop a shell like this coming in not so much at close range it'll definitely protect you from splinters and blasters as long as it doesn't come through this slot um but it will keep the crew a bit better safe than this if this we should actually open mount and uh since we're now at the end of this section sitting on top a portion of the superstructure you can also see there just through the side view the sale of USS which is moored between Olympia and the shore we're going to head down onto the first True full length deck right off well the rest of the outro piece is just a bit of screaming static so probably best you don't hear it anyway they also have these rather wonderful display models on the ship so you can see the difference in color scheme and layout of the ship as time goes on so this is what Olympia looked like during her first commission as you can see there that ended in 1899 and then you move on to her appearance of the battle of Manila Bay where she's all in Gray now this doesn't mean that portrayals of U.S Navy ships in the Spanish-American War wearing the peacetime white colors are incorrect it just means that at the time of the battle of Manila Bay this is what Olympia looks like because the ships would be repainted into this wartime coloration around this time at least in some navies but maybe not necessarily All Ships were able to do so before they ended up in a place where repainting was not possible and then she reverts back into Great White Fleet style camouflage or paint Scheme really for her second commission running through to 1906 and so you can see from what you've seen already and what you'll see elsewhere from other photos of the ship that she is currently on display in her second commission paint Scheme and then in the first world war of course she goes back to wartime coloration and at this point she's had amongst other things her 8-inch guns replaced with long barrel five inch guns so this is effectively her final appearance before she goes out of commission entirely and for those of you who were wondering this is what the protected deck scheme for Olympia looks like so you can see the flat part of the deck is essentially level with the water line maybe just a fraction above it and it has these two much thicker sloping sides to the protected deck below which is the engine room the magazines boilers etc etc and of particular interest to those of you who may be more familiar with world one and World War II ship design layouts you can see the magazines here are right at the base of the ship right up next to the hull right next to the ocean and of course in later areas the magazines will be moved much closer to the center line of the ship and a little bit higher as protection against mines and underwater explosives such as Torpedoes which of course if they hit Olympia in this location would immediately set off the magazines but given that Olympia is a 19th century vessel although mines and Torpedoes were around they weren't as much of a design consideration Factor at that point and hence with gunfire being the main thing that I wanted to guard the magazines against they were simply stuck as far down in the ship as was humanly possible now with all that said back to the ship so oft main battery this is supposed to be a pair of 8 inch 35 caliber guns so again for those of you what you'll realize 35 caliber is a bit short for what we usually thinking about 45 50 caliber but again this is the late 18th century so 35 caliber is pretty good for the time period guns 10 15 years ago even shorter 15 20 25 calibers 20th century that you see most Battleship guns pushing and heavy guns on Cruisers pushing past the 40 caliber limit and for those of you who may not be aware what on Earth I'm talking about the caliber to a couple of things so the actual caliber of the gun is an eight inch gun so this Gap here is the width of the gun or more precisely this is the bore this is a eight inches um and then if you measure the shell you'll find it's eight inches wide because it has to fit in there and then expressed as eight inch dash 35 or 8 inch 35 caliber basically means if you were to take 35 18 shells end on usually base end on and put them here and count one two three four and we'll get you to the back now the one thing you have to say about these guns is hopefully you heard that because that hurt um these are not the originals they're Hollow if this was the actual thing um and the reason that these are replicas you see they've been welded in because the turret is also a replica and um on the little spotting positions above they've just kind of again had to paint in what should be a viewing slit is because Olympia had a very long life in the U.S Navy and during that time she was refitted because 8 inch 35 caliber gun cities not such a brilliant Weapon by let's say the 1920s and so over time she was refitted and um removal of the one forward and it was replaced with a pair of four inch guns a little bit of a climb down in terms of overall Firepower but they're more modern the range and then those were subsequently replaced by a pair of five inch guns which makes a little bit more sense because her secondary Armament which you can see here case mitted although nowadays with Windows um is also five inch so at least that's a uniform main battery and then when she became a museum ship she still had those twin five inch guns the original 8-inch guns and turrets would long ago gone to the scrapyard and so in order to restore her to the condition she was in during the Spanish-American War they've had to construct these replicas and so here they are now back in her 1890s 1900s appearance this is the ship's wheel or rather two of them part of the same system so this is one of the auxiliary control positions again an element of redundancy built into the ship you can all you can also steer the ship from lower down and we'll probably find one or two of those as we go but as you can probably appreciate being up right forward on the bridge bit of an exposed position if that gets blown up or if there's enough fragments that have taken out the crew there you can have a backup steering position here now the reason obviously it's back up is well if I'm stuck here I can't see anything there's all sorts or intakes bits of superstructure more importantly the AFT funnel kind of getting in the way of me knowing what on Earth's going on now if someone is up here on the Flying Bridge yelling down orders perhaps that might work but to be honest most of the stuff that's in for me also in the way for them it's not ideal but we're sheltered Behind These numbers and being in the area of the half eight inch twin turret so this is about the best hope for as a backup steering position apart from the obviously the bridge forward before you have to go below decks so that's what this is for and the reason you've got two wheels is that in harking Back to the age of sale and ships of the line up to ropes to man deer the ship I.E you know direct there's a connection from the wheel to the tiller as opposed to technically assisted one which is what you'd normally use but you obviously might lose if the ship's taking hits and power is dying right so we're now in the superstruct so you can see just how compact this ship is compared to battleships and some of the later cruises and such we've been on The Galley is in the middle of the base there's tables and benches for the crew to eat so both Galley and mess there's accommodation further off for the Admiral and for some of the other senior staff and here this is a ammunition area so this particular is a refrigerator room but you would also have ammunition stored around here you've also got there's an ice machine because of course there is but in all of this space you're literally living right next to the guns now this gun is not one of the originals that was present for the Spanish-American War although it is a five inch gun this is a more recent five inch 51 caliber gun although on a ship this age you say more recent this was 50 to the ship in the position of the original five inch gun in the middle of the first world war so it's still a pretty old weapon and in fact if you look here it says U.S naval gun Factory um 1915 So that's its state of manufacture and it weighs 466 pounds or rather I rather suspect some of the ammunition in charge way that's like rather think this way is a bit more than 446 pounds anyway it also shows evidence of accent modification so over here we have the five inch Gun Site this is Mark 21-17 converted from Mark 21 mod 6 in 1938 so just before the second world war broke out you can actually still move this around to a degree but you can't move the gun itself because understandably enough they've locked that in position although all the teeth and everything still still look pretty good what you can do is open the breach so we can demonstrate that now this is obviously a huge heavy chunk of metal but I can move it one-handed quite easily because it's very well balanced so this is a perfect close-up example of what's called an interrupted screw breech so you open it up shell and propellant or one piece ammunition if you've got it depending on obviously the type of gun because five inch six inch guns sometimes they'll have two piece ammunition sometimes they'll have one piece ammunition but whatever the explodey stuff goes in there and then this goes back and as you can see just by going in it's already moving itself to close you close it and now the gun is ready to fire which we can't do for obvious reasons but you can also see why it's called interrupted screw because you've got these screw threads but they exist only on these flanges I'll open it back up again so you can see so you've got a couple of screw threads here a couple of screw threads here and corresponding bits in the gun and that screws shut and that forms an airtight breach the gun is now ready to go so this is part of Olympia's secondary battery and would remain so throughout her career even when obviously they are different five-inch guns so this is one of the original type of guns the original five inch guns that Olympia would have had as a secondary so we've seen the five inch 51 that's a considerably large weapon this is a five inch 40 so if you're following along this 11 caliber shorter and given that it's a five inch gun that means it's 55 inches shorter but you can also see it's just physically a less imposing weapon the 5 inch 51 is kind of up to here this one's down here it's got a much simpler sight system nice little telescope you can look through there and there some simple brass plating there and also has this Nifty little stand and another one on the other side which means that as the gun moves so here is where you rotate it you can rotate the gun and the gun will take you with it um you can see the various firing options here out of the side and a much smaller although still interrupted screw breach system so according to this this is Ordnance Department this is nut gun number 79 and it weighs 7208 pounds that much I do believe a lot more than the other one claiming it's only 446 and it's a five inch five inch mount Mark 8 number 89 and it was installed in 1889 so again original gun on the ship now before we descend any lower let's check out the machine shop on board the ship such as it is so these are the various tools that they had to make repairs create spares and so on and so forth but one of the things that you'll notice on the top right of this picture as compared to the machine shops on the various more modern US Museum ships that we've seen on the tour so far or indeed on HMS Belfast is that obviously being a late 19th century installation this does not have any kind of electrical motor driving instead it has these big belts and those belts would in real life once the ship was in active service connect to this overhead shaft and then that shaft would be driven from past the ship's power plant elsewhere so this is fan belt Driving Systems which were very very common in the 19th century and something I'm sure you'll be very happy to know is that now as we head further below decks there was enough of Olympia's bulk to obscure whatever electromagnetic signals they were on the river that were causing all the issues with static and gaps in the recording thus far and so from here on out the audio is nice and crisp and clear all right we find ourselves in the depths of the ship this is one of the boiler rooms and believe it or not what you can see behind me is one boiler so you might hang on a minute you know there's one two three four great surely that's four boilers no no there's one big cylinder mostly hiding behind this stuff and these are for furnaces all supplying one boiler and then there will be multiple boiler rooms now over here this WT Door Number 27 water type 427 this slightly pre-dates you know having X Y and Z all I suppose if you're American X Y and Z all over various doors so this is just a named Wireless door there's water type door not one store um and this goes through to a corresponding Boiler Room um just on the port side over there and there's a very narrow passage between the two which obviously I can't show you because the camera won't follow me just yet so if you want to go through there I guess you could do if you like being between two massive boilers full of piping hot water and steam and coal fires and everything but personally I'd rather not and then as you come across so each of these grates would be have to be opened to allow coal to be shuffled in okay and over here this is where the coal all comes from so you could I guess shovel it all if you wanted to one one off but they're apparently there is a procedure for curl shoveling so the Coal's over in here in the depth of the coal bunkers some poor circuits to stand in the coal bunker I don't want to think what his lungs looked like after a few years in service but he gets to shovel coal out of there which will land somewhere here and then somebody would be standing here hopefully with good Shin protection getting pelted with bits of coal they will pick up the coal and they will shove it over here and it'll land around here and then there'll be two guys who will then pick up the coal let's be sure to them and straight into the various furnaces it will go and in case you're wondering what the numbers mean well one three two and four fairly self-explanatory those are the furnaces for this particular boiler but then you also have a much bigger number five up there don't worry there's not a mysterious uh great number five hiding behind an armored panel that you'd need to be Kobe Bryant to actually manage that is because this is one this is the fifth Boiler Room so there are at least five others and of course because these Machinery spaces are not uneven there will be at least a sixth as well map appearing on the screen at the moment to show you exactly where all their where they all are so once you've turned coal into heat and the Heat's gone into the water and the water is turned into the steam what happens to the steam because this isn't a jet boat you're not venting huge amounts of superheated steam aft to make yourself go forward has to be used in another fashion let's go that way and find out let's go and no as you can tell from the fact I'm speaking we're not writing we're not reversing footage I am actually walking backwards which I'll probably regret at some point in the very near future when I walk into something heavy now we're in an engine room and unlike every other engine room you'll have seen on this tour this isn't turbines this isn't gear turbines this is even even isn't even direct drive turbines these are the good old vertical triple expansion engines so if you want to experience what a sauna full of engine grease is like well time travel 120 years back to when these things were working because they're not going to be running them these days but you can see it's a much more steampunk experience than the engine rooms of the more modern ships so you have these massive great Pistons well the business end of one Pistons are above and obviously you can see the cam rotates around here lots of lubricant needed to keep this from grinding to a screaming halt and this continues I got one two three big ones and there's a little thing a little little fishing rod just there so each of these three will have a different pressure of steam mine hence vertical triple expansion and as you can see that they've all been set in different positions that isn't just for artistic purposes this is actually the way that they would be configured because it means that at any given time at least one of them is pushing power into the shaft if they were all aligned in a nice neat line then they'd all be a big surge down but there would also therefore be periods where there's not particularly any Force being exerted and they all connect to a propeller shaft which runs down there to the after the ship going out the back there and as you can see from what we've got here on the table for engines of this size you also need equally outsized tools various forms of wrenches mostly and there's a small auxiliary plant here plenty of nice levers gears and of course a sound tube so you can hear what's being said above you because of course again no electrical Communications when she's originally built this allows you to open or shut the steam flow as is indicated here open and shut nice big wheel to turn got quite a bit of heft to it as well and despite the fact that this is an older technology than turbine engines it's no less complicated so we can you can see here these are just some of the levers that would have to be used in operation so we've got left Port cylinder drain intermediate Port cylinder drain uh intermediate pressure that's a low pressure intermediate pressure high pressure so this is the the three different cylinders the different stages hence vertical triple expansion uh low pressure receiver I intermediate pressure high pressure receiver drain so this is all to get rid of water and other things that might accumulate because of course as far as engines are concerned water is incompressible you don't want that building up you want steaming these things you do not want liquid water and now you have the reversing engine low pressure startup and New Year pressure startup high pressure startup currently all set in the shut position which is stop then you've got settings going down and settings going up for a head and reverse and how do you know what you're going to set them to well you remember all the way back up on the bridge we saw a couple of small versions of this and this would be communicated down here and this is how the engine room knows where they're supposed to go again this has been disconnected but apparently go the other way yeah this is why you don't try and manually do the thing there's a fair bit of spring pressure on there but you know it might sound a little bit unnecessary now but when you've got this entire engine possibly the secondary power plant going as well bits of steam and lubricant flying around people shouting the sound of people walking around on metal decking going on this dial nice and smoothly moving into position it's not really going to tell much of anything people are going to probably miss it whereas if they hear a that'll probably alert them to the fact that something's gone on um also have a few more pressure gauges and such showing and uh the single biggest friend of an engineer in a vertical triple expansion engine room lubricant applicator because the last thing you want to hear is the squealing of metal on metal as one of these things eats itself but in the event that something does seize up and tries to heat itself you have the I wasn't asking physical impact mechanical stress routine tool otherwise known as the big wrench so this again is another piece of Machinery you won't see outside of Olympia on this tour and that's because this piece of Machinery is completely unnecessary on an oil-fired ship on an oil-fired ship everything that builds up in the form of residue is either in the boiler which is not really a good place for it to be or mostly it hopefully gets exhausted out of the funnel which was not particularly great for anything that happens to be in the immediate vicinity but it's good for the ship but on a coal powered vessel there is a problem coal does not burn cleanly in the sense of coal does not burn cleanly at least in the same way that oil relatively speaking does coal leaves a huge amount of physical residue behind now if you have really good quality anthracite coal less if you're the German Navy and you're stuck with barely compressed peat then a little bit more considerably more in fact but regardless you're still going to have hot ash waste from burning the coal and you can't leave that in the boilers you can't leave that in the furnaces you can't leave that down below otherwise you're just going to end up waist deep in Ash which means that considering that love comes straight out of a furnace you will gradually parboiling yourself which apparently is not good for long-term health so they would have to shove it all into buckets but then who gets to haul hundreds and hundreds of pounds of Ash in buckets up out of the ship well they have thought of that that's what this thing is for so down in the Boiler Room below there was an ash hoist and this is the up upper opposite end of the ash hoist obviously there'll be chains cables ropes depending on the time period attached to these and this little bit of Kit would allow you to haul up a big bucket of Ash up to 300 pounds weight which we'll get to here and then it's still a fairly thankless task to get rid of it but it's at least now above the water line so few people can quite easily pick it up cart it out over the side and off it goes so we are now about two-thirds away back in on the ship and we have some of the officers country so as you can see it's fairly well appointed nice tables officers wardrobe paneling and that helps them forget perhaps for a moment that they're on a warship on the high seas in the event of action all of this would go away all of this paneling is in fact removable and you can probably see just above it the actual steel bulkheads and the reason it's removable is because well one if Michelle arrives aboard somewhere here it is fantastic shrapnel opportunity um and that's at the best of times the worst at times of course it's wood which means it might not just turn into splinters it might also turn into fire and a fire hazard is not a good thing anywhere on the ship but again another idea of just how compact the Olympia is there's a six pounder gun here just on the on the port side and then over on the starboard side there's another six pounder rapid fire gun so these six Pounders are all over the ship we saw some right up top behind little armored Shield these ones are more properly what you would call casemitted because they are fully enclosed and there is a bit of more protection as well and just above us there's a skylight so that goes further up and that's in a natural light because although whilst although electric lighting was available for ships in this time period it's not reliable uh bulbs below and of course you can't just pop down to the local shop for Replacements and there are also of somewhat limited capacity if you have the direct sun coming straight down through there onto your dinner you're going to be able to see things a lot better than you would with just the available squirrel catch light bulbs and that ladies and gentlemen wraps up our little partial tour of USS Olympia again I apologize for the audio issues in the first half of the video but I I have no idea what either the New Jersey state Authority or the Philadelphia state Authority is doing blasting large amounts of em radiation down the river but they are an precious little I can do about that nonetheless absolutely huge thanks to the crew of USS Olympia who of course let me onto the ship let me film let me down into those lower areas like the engine room The Boiler Room Etc and generally we're just incredibly helpful in pointing out where the best ways to go were and at one point uh when I got slightly turned around pointed out which way was indeed the way up and out now what you might have spotted in some of these exterior shots and you can see on the right in this picture is of course the bow of the USS bakuna which is Olympia's companion along the Waterfront of Philadelphia and that is also an excellent well boat rather than ship to visit unfortunately didn't have the time to do a complete tour we were shown around the bakuna but by that point the camera's batteries were dying and well I just didn't have the time to create a video about bakuna herself at least this time around uh who knows next time around maybe I'll be doing that as well so of course as I said before you know it's a partial tour because I don't want to make it so that you don't have to go to Olympia to see what is what all over the ship so I do highly encourage you if you can to go and have a look around Olympia yourself and if you are unable to do that and you've enjoyed this video then please do consider popping over to USS Olympia's page which will be linked in the video description below and you know support them in some way shape or form they have a quite nice little gift shop associated with them and I'm sure they'd appreciate any help that anyone can give them especially considering that this is the one of the oldest steel warships still afloat and they've been working extremely hard to ensure that she stays that way and of course what was the next ship on the journey well it's just over the river over there in New Jersey it is in fact USS New Jersey so spoiler alert which ship we're going to be looking at as part of the continuing series the US tour next month have fun until then that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry dock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 188,894

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Id: fzi416jk1D0

Length: 44min 32sec (2672 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 02 2022