USS Wisconsin - Give way to oncoming battleships!

foreign [Music] [Music] well ladies and gentlemen we finally have reached the end of the ships that I visited in April 2022 about a month and a half before I head off to the states to look at a whole bunch of other new ships and during the time that this presentation Series has been going on I've been over to the us a couple of other times in the beginning of 2023 and picked up some more information about various other ships which will also obviously be seen later on on the channel but such as it is you know there's a lot of ships in the states and we're finishing off of course with the mighty USS Wisconsin and plus a way to finish off I mean you've heard me talk quite a few times during this series about presentation and whilst Wisconsin is not broadside on to the mainland as you can see she's moored off of the museum just there well there's not many times you can pull up a set of traffic lights and have a battleship staring at you the in the other direction and indeed this particular picture was taken by me from the multi-story car park which I parked in to go and visit the ship and flipping it around if you squint really really hard you might be able to see the car that I was driving at the time somewhere in that little multi-story just above the right hand gun barrel of turret 2 there nonetheless as the mention of that museum will probably clue you in Wisconsin is part of a larger installation she's part of the Nauticus Maritime Discovery Center which can of course be found in Norfolk and yes that Norfolk the not the British Norfolk that's a part of East Anglia the American Norfolk that is also home to a good chunk of the current active U.S Navy and if you go to the stern of the ship and you look out over the stern you'll see a bunch of them and indeed driving up to the Nauticus area you'll come across a bunch of them on this side of the river as well but getting back to the Wisconsin the docents there were kind enough to meet me pretty much at the entrance and offer me a full guided tour around the ship so you're going to benefit from seeing some of what I was able to see on my way around and as I've said before you know every Iowa class presents things differently I'm not going to say that any one of them does things better or worse than the other it's just different that each experience is very enjoyable and since I've wrapped up my U.S tour in April 2022 I did also have a brief opportunity to go aboard Missouri but not the full tour experience because that's while I was at the hintzer conference nonetheless welcome inside turret number one now you might be thinking hang on a minute track we've seen the interior of us 16 inch turrets and even those of the Iowa class on this channel before this looks suspiciously roomy and you'd be correct originally this would not have been quite as roomy as it seems however during the various upgrades that the Iowa's had during the Cold War period turret ones own Rangefinder was removed and that's why you can see where they've got this audio visual display there is this big hole in the side of the turret that subsequently been plated up this is where the port side of that big Rangefinder would originally have gone but as I said was subsequently removed you could just see it to the right there if you're watching in high definition that door is to the left hand gun room and as we pan around you can see some of the equipment that would be used to communicate both with the bridge with Fire Control and with the men in the individual gun rooms because whilst you're in the turret you are of course at this stage locked away from any of the guns which are just forward of this bulkhead and as we look over to the starboard side of the turret you can see of course the other blanking plate where the rangefinder went out that side yes the door indicates that in fact the crew did name each individual gun and of course you can see a small Fire Control computer just here in the foreground which would be used if everything else outside the turret was either not operational or somehow the communications lines had been cut although without the input of the big Rangefinder it's a little bit difficult to imagine how they would have gotten the data to actually aim the guns because of course there's no radar stuck directly on top of the turret but there you go speaking of guns here's one of them looking through the porthole into that chamber you can see obviously the loading tray just here is in the upright position because the gun is elevated to a reasonable extent and therefore is not in a position to be loaded in fact if this gun was already loaded at this stage it would be in a position to fire but you can also then see the recoil compensators built in on the top which is quite an interesting sight to see one of the spotting periscopes is however still present you can see that here coming out of the ceiling of the turret now if the rangefinder was still here you would use this if you're operating under local control to find a Target because it moves independently of the turret and then you could direct the rangefinders to have a look at it and you can also use it to spot the fall of shot so you're between that when the rangefinder was there and the fire control computer you are your own self-contained little gun plotting area of course it's nowhere near the same level of finesse or height in terms of viewing long distance as the main Fire Control Systems which is why they are the main Fire Control Systems but it is a useful backup and just in front of guns Larry and Daryl we can see how much you can Traverse to the left or the right with this little dial here and then this dial that is the vertical Traverse but of course the lens down here doesn't move the lens up top moves there are two such devices in turret one and that allows you to track your existing Target and look for a new one at the same time this is another similar unit although this is coming out of the conning Tower further up so this is not on turret one but it's a very similar device and while we're in the turret this is a view of that little fire control computer now a little bit later we will pop down into the main Fire Control area aka the plotting room and you'll see the one down there is significantly more complex but I mean this thing's complicated enough in my view these really are Little Wonders of electromechanical calculation capabilities especially when you consider the fact that the big ones down further in the ship turned out to be just as if not more accurate than the computerized programmable systems which were brought in during the 1980s refit and here's where the turret Captain would sit so as you can see this is just in front of gun Daryl but he has a whole load of different bits of equipment that he can play with just in the foreground here you can see some of that little fire control computer he's also got telephone so you can talk to other parts of the ship assuming they're still alive and in the back all those rotary dials are for connecting to various parts of the ship's Fire Control System so again if you zoom in close on a high def screen you'll be able to see that the different selectors are actually pointing to different systems such as the plotting room aft plotting run forward local plotting and so on and so forth and there's also this which not only shows the status of the three guns in the turret in that display on the top right there but also down at the bottom shows where turret 1 is pointing but also usefully where turret 2 is pointing which might give a clue if obviously if everything else has been cut off as to where you might want to engage and then of course all of that plus the giant Rangefinder is duplicated in turret 2 just above a behind turret one and in turret 3 at the other end of the ship and of course you also have to remember that Wisconsin thanks to a collision had to have her Barrel replaced and that was replaced by the bow of her incomplete sister ship Kentucky so if you find yourself aboard USS Wisconsin and you try to set up a picture somewhat like this as you back further and further up the bow in search of the perfect shot at some point you will eventually cross over onto the bit of the ship that used to be Kentucky now I challenge you to find the line where that actual demarcation is spoiler alert you almost certainly won't find it but it is fun to think that at some point you'll be Crossing between parts of what what used to be two different vessels but speaking of the main plotting room let's go down there now of course this is part of the plotting equipment the or the fire control equipment depending what you want to call it there is of course the mark one Fire Control computer which is the heart of everything but you have various little upgrades and as I've said before back in those days if you wanted to upgrade the system it wasn't a case of downloading a little bit of extra DLC and slapping that on it's an entire physical segment that's bolted onto your original component and then you've got controllers for Star shell controllers for your anti-aircraft Weaponry Shore bombardment the stable elements and a host of other equipment and whilst these electromechanical Fire Control Systems down here in front of you do the final calculations much like you saw in the turret down here you have huge Banks of arrays as you can see at the back there with levers and dials and switches which Supply power and control the flow of data to and from these systems to the rest of the ship now have you ever wanted to see inside these systems well now you get the chance because they were very kind and lifted some of the access ports which would normally be used for maintenance and so you can see some of what goes on inside these various Fire Control computers you can see up at the top left part of a rotary assembly that will be displaying data at the top of the fire control computer plus you can see a few cables on the middle left and then there's a lot of gears and crankshafts and cams because as I said this is electromechanical with a fairly heavy emphasis on the mechanical element and there are a number of good reasons to have such a heavy mechanical presence in what is effectively a computer and it's not just because the limitations of Technology at the time bearing in mind that the first true electrical computers at places like Bletchley Park are probably the size of the entire room if not more and you can't really afford to take that something like that to C A because at the time the I was laid down it hasn't been invented yet B it's far too big can see it's far too fragile plus far too expensive but it also means that in the event of complete power failure you can actually run this as a purely mechanical system you just have to hope you're not the poor oldenson who ends up being told here is the rotational handle start cranking in the middle of battle because to get all of this stuff moving you're going to be putting a fair amount of force in for a very very long time and of course in a classic example of the tools to make the tools to make the tools whilst this fire control computer is a tool which will enable you to use another set of tools I.E the guns to actually do the work you want them to do when you look at the number and precision of the gears that are present in this you also realize there has to be an entire industry dedicated to manufacturing precision machine components not just inventing the idea wholesale because for example if this geared ring here was maybe an eighth of an inch short or long on the radius that would completely change the number of teeth it had if you're working on a set size of teeth which would completely ruin all the settings that it relies on because everything down to the gear ratios for this has to be finely tuned finally calibrated and finally calculated for it all to work the big thing we've kind of been dancing around in here appears to be some kind of gyroscope you can see there in the left of the picture there's a little bubble level that will allow allow you to determine if the thing is set to level or if it's not what degree it's off by and of course gyroscopic leveling was a very important element to all of this because of course if the computer which bolts to the ship doesn't know what the ship is doing in terms of pitch and roll and so forth which the gyro will tell them then it's going to have great difficulty working out the necessary Corrections for that for the ship's guns also braided insulation is really nice and as we mentioned earlier once all that data has been processed you have to decide where it gets sent and obviously also where the input for all of this data is coming from you might have an anemometer try pressing that thing first which will give you wind speed but there might be several on the ship you have to choose which one or which ones you're going to be taking data from there'll be switches on here for that you'll have the RPM measured at the propeller shafts you might have your Pito log supplying you also with a estimate of the ship speed compasses providing bearing systems coming from the ship's wheel and all the ships rather telling you how far over the rudder is and so on and so forth and all of this data has to be filtered processed turned into a foot control solution and then that solution has to be kicked all the way back up the line again and bear in mind there's more than one computer in here for different purposes there'll be a lot of duplication along here because you might want to relay data from different computers to different parts of the ship but then switch over to transmitting data from a different from a different computer to that same part of the ship so you can spend most of the day just looking at all of those and working out which ones go to which parts of the ship also down in the depths of the ship you can find the ships Machinery spaces and in those Machinery spaces you find all sorts of weird and wonderful and interesting diagrams made sometimes a paper sometimes printed onto steel sheets and various other ways of imprinting knowledge onto the human mind which have been stationed all around the engine spaces while in the boiler spaces as well now this is not to try and teach people what to do in an emergency because quite frankly just look at this thing this is for forced draft which increases air pressure for the boilers which of course makes the ship go a little bit quicker and a little burn fuel a little bit more efficiently and you can't possibly expect somebody to read this plus as you can probably see the two Associated informationary panels and suddenly become a miraculous expert at the force draft mechanisms in an emergency now this is to allow you to teach some new staff who have just come down what to do they can study it and also provides just a handy reference on occasion if somebody who is in the middle of that learning process forgets what they're supposed to do or forgets what a very specific component does you'll notice up on the top right it talks about valves being normally open normally closed uh some that are locked open and where various indicators are so if somebody has just briefly forgotten or is unsure what the status of a particular valve should be or where they can go and find the status of something this will tell them we're in Fairly short order and speaking of boilers you can actually look through into the boiler spaces themselves this is obviously drizzling from just outside the boiler now whilst the red lighting is obviously for effect the ability to look into the boiler is not actually just for tourists and visit other visitors this is actually a fairly important part of General ship's maintenance I mean you wouldn't want to be looking in like this especially without any glass whilst the wall is actually active but you might want to check when the boiler is cold for things like um I don't know fire bricks that may be giving up the ghost or other slight deformities in the boiler or does the thing need cleaning and so on and so forth because all of these things are very important to a keeping the ship operational and be perhaps more important to the engineering staff not having a boiler explode on you especially with all that high pressure steam it's generating and so being able to take a glance inside without having to dismantle the thing or cart massive hatches off of it is very very important of course once the boiler has generated heat which has then turned water into steam which has then gone through the turbines and the turbines have rotated and they have a bunch of rotational kinetic energy going you need to translate that down somewhat into a sensible rate of RPM and that's where this big cased thing comes in this is part of the ship's reduction gear system and yes it also has an area for inspection although in this case those areas are covered over you can see there on the bottom left bolted shut because well later in the Cold War some people started putting things in there to try and stop the ships removing not specifically Wisconsin but other Navy ships and this was very expensive made them very very unpopular and so it was necessary to secure them against outside interference and that's because the reduction gears look like this well this is a small part of the reduction gear system but well there's only so much that you can photograph cameras because obviously cameras generally have a narrower angle on their lenses than the human eyeball does nonetheless you can see how large and precise these things are they have to International very very finely and so putting something like literally putting a spanner in the works well that's gonna destroy their usefulness as reduction gears and they're very big very expensive and because as we said they're very precisely machined they take a very long time to make and since this is the way that the force of the ship's engines is translated to the propeller shaft and then to the ship's crew yeah if you lose one of these your ships in a lot of trouble something else that can be found on display in several places throughout the ship's Machinery spaces are little racks like this and yes those are specimen jars and no they're not for what you're thinking get your mind out of the gutter these specimen jars are for holding specimens of oil and other fluids taken from the ship's machinery and the reason there's so many is one there's a lot of systems but two it also means you have a record over several days and possibly even weeks depending on your inspection schedule of what those fluids looked like which means that if something is going subtly and gradually wrong and maybe a fluid is getting considerably darker than it should or possibly even lighter than it should you can look at you know several days or several weeks worth of Records right in front of your eyes and go hmm yeah either this is doing what it should do or this is really not doing what it should do and we should probably go and investigate what's going on and make it stop doing that and if there's anything fine suspended in the oil which might be agitated at the time you retrieve it it will also have several days to settle out so if there are say small metal shavings because something's gone wrong internally then you might not notice that might just look like very slightly cloudy oil at the start but if you leave it for two or three days then you'll notice ah there appears to be a buildup of small metal flakes at the bottom of this jar that is not good we should again do something about it now this control station as you might guess is at least partially modernized but it does give me certain Star Trek impression certainly the original series now of course Gene Roddenberry served in the U.S Air Force or Army Air Force at the time during World War II not in the U.S Navy but you know looking at this one and a half to imagine at some point he was in some kind of large Navy capital ship control room because yeah look at the original series USS Enterprise Bridge especially around the edges substitute the grave for a bit of black and yeah tell me you don't see the same thing and speaking of seeing things no this is not the spirit of engineering shifts past this is in fact one of the audio visual presentations they have down in the engine room which is kind of a I guess a holographic projection of A Sort on 2A thin screen which is otherwise transparent allowing you to see through into the rest of the space behind it when the presentation isn't going on but it is actually very interesting and very well put together so very nice feature if you happen to take a tour down there there's also one that goes over your head which shows the workings of the Machinery but I wasn't able to catch a decent view of that particular one because of the angle so doing a bit of a ping pong from the engine room all the way up back up to the bridge and you'll see on the bridge there is this very handy little dial which I'm sure everyone else in the ship's company appreciated when the ship was opening fire it is the Salvo warning indicator with a nice little flip switch from off to on so of course if you are about to fire a salvo of your guns you can tell the rest of the crew there is about to be a very very loud bang and if you have a voice of whatever reason to be out on deck which you should not be because we're at action stations but if you are you may wish to relocate yourself before you are forcibly relocated by the back blast it's amazing what loquacious sentiments you can express with a simple buzzer and this is the interior of the conning tower now you remember from the last time we looked at an Iowa class video that being USS Iowa herself this conning Tower is one level lower than the one found on Iowa so Missouri New Jersey and Wisconsin all have this one level lower conning tout because Iowa was designed to be a flagship and therefore had to include the extra level so another useful visual reference if you happen to be trying to work out which one is which but you can see just how thick the armor plate is because you can see the way the viewing slit actually begins and ends and the rather extensive amount of Steel that lies between the two and of course just here in the top middle of the picture is the viewport for the little Periscope that we saw earlier which is sitting merrily atop said Connie Tower and one of the neat little features I like about said kindtar is this little phone that's attached to the outside so if you're in the middle of combat and some element of the ship's command crew has gone down into the tower and you happen to be outside the tower and you've noticed something that maybe you think they haven't noticed and you need to tell them about it you can pick up this phone and just talk to the people who are on the other side of over well over a foot of Steel whilst presumably fragments and shells and all sorts of other rather lethal things rain down around you or alternatively if you are fighting at long range with the Iowa's Fire Control System plugging the shells back down at the enemy rather nicely you can phone them and tell them what a spectacular view they're missing as you watch the glowing streaks disappear over the horizon and from up here we can also get a view of some of the ship's remaining a secondary battery the 5-inch 38 caliber guns of course now we are actually looking at one third of the total 5 inch 38 Armament of the ship because all of the Iowa's had the AFT 2 per side 5 inch 38 gun mounts removed during their refit in the 1980s to accommodate the Harpoon and Tomahawk missile launchers so you only have three mounts per side now which is a little bit of a shame but if you want to see all of the 5-inch 38 mounts that would be found on a World War II yes fast Battleship you can of course see Alabama North Carolina or Massachusetts because they still retain all 20 of their guns which of course brings up the interesting point if USS South Dakota had been retained then you would have had a third set of 5-inch 38 guns in terms of layout because of course she only had eight mounts four per side to begin with because like iosu was fitted as a flagship but nonetheless these are the ones on Wisconsin these are the port side guns in case you're interested you can also see down there on the center left a compass and way down there on the right I believe that's a form of gun trainer and then looking up from the same position we can see the port side flag signal haliads which are of course very important when she's launched because although radio and voice radio and a few other methods of communication such as signal lamps exist at this point the ability to signal with flags to other ships in formation or in Harbor is still a very important way of letting everybody know what you're doing because apart from anything else radio can be intercepted even if they don't necessarily know what you're doing or what you're saying the very fact there is a radio transmission tells them that someone is out there so if you want to make very quiet signals to people then actually signal lamp or flag is better and flags can be read by everybody and can stay up for a prolonged period of time whereas signal lamps especially during the day can be a little bit hard to spot and tend to only be able to be directed as a single vessel and then heading after past the missile launch platforms we come across this this is actually a picture that's upside down I flipped it so that you could read it presumably when this hatch is open it will then be obviously down so it will be legible to people normally but anyway as you can see on the top right here it says caution radiation area no loitering when nuclear weapons present so I'm presuming that that means that tomahawks radiation shielding wasn't particularly brilliant um or maybe it's just one of those you know dot all the eyes can cross all the t's types of signs but in any case how exactly are you supposed to know whether or not this particular nuclear missile well this particular cruise missile is armed with a nuclear warhead thus making it a nuclear missile it's not necessarily entirely explained but it's there anyway and then there's this area which as you can see has a series of hooks to allow you to hang bicycles from it now there was a particular story as to why Wisconsin has an upside down bicycle rack on her aft suburbed quarter but for the life of me I can't remember exactly what it is I think it was something to do with where she was based at the time and either the men running ship Security on the key side or people just going ashore would find it easier to get around if they had bikes available and so this was an area where they could store bikes as long as you were good at weaving in and out between them and well now I guess it's either still in use or possibly part of the present historical presentation and you might have seen through the bicycles there this five inch 38 turret which of course has the US Marine Corps symbol on it because in both the US and Royal navies and in a number of other navies across the world it was traditional in the age of steam and steel for the Marine complement aboard to provide the gun Crews for at least one and usually more than one turret aboard the ship assuming that they weren't all concentrated in one of the bigger main turrets but it varies from ship to ship and also depending on the size of the ship as well the only reason really that that tradition is mostly discontinued these days is that most modern ships if they have a gun turret at all will tend to only have one and it tends to be automated as well so the Marines have to find something else to do with their time but nonetheless this was a marine man 5-inch 38 so it gets the Marine Corps logo also in this area on the AFT starboard side you'll find this little commemorative black well the plaque itself is technically off to the left there with this information sign which will tell you about the time in March 1952 where Wisconsin took the only Direct Hit as a result of enemy action in her entire career when a six-inch shell hit as the sign says a couple of levels above this particular spot it only injured three Sailors with shrapnel nobody died fortunately well nobody died aboard Wisconsin um given that Wisconsin immediately returned fire with its main battery and utterly obliterated the artillery battery I rather suspect there were a few fatal North Korean casualties that day and also from approximately this spot this is one of the views you get as I said you can see some of the current active U.S Navy this is some kind of Landing ship I'm not entirely sure which one although close in analysis of the photo on my computer suggests there is a number one involved on the side of the island potentially making this USS Wasp but I there's so much greenage and Scaffolding I don't know if that's the only number on there or if it's part of a larger number anyway maybe someone else knows what which exact vessel this is anyway heading back inside the ship there is actually quite an extensive area of the ship's accommodation and other regular Duty stations available open to the public and restored I mean you can't go inside the individual compartments because well mainly I suspect because people would either mess things up or Nick things but you can look at them from the entrance ways so in this case this is the medical admin station where presumably the ship's medical staff can write up reports on the many various and slightly ludicrous ways in which the crew will continue to manage to get themselves injured just read any of the ongoing daily logs of any Iowa class Battleship to find people doing all sorts of crazy things from dropping massive your plates on their toes to trying to clean the interior of some of the relatively rare large open spaces and then falling several dozen feet to being bitten or stung by various local bits of insect life cracking their heads on doorways and hatchways that you know haven't really moved in the months or years those people have been on board and very very occasionally someone actually gets injured in a serious way that actually merits some consideration because nobody expected that to happen nearby is the medical laboratory section where various experiments could be carried out to determine what exact form of particularly interesting tropical disease that a sailor has brought back on board whether that be from the local environment or from the local populace in either case the wonderful stainless steel surfaces can be easily scrubbed down and sterilized which is probably just as well with some rather extensive shelving to hold both the results and the various chemicals and concoctions you need to find out which supplies you're going to need to bulk order replacements for next and then on the occasion that someone really has something very badly wrong with them it could be appendicitis it could be um particularly bad lacerations to have winds blunt force trauma broken bone injuries shrapnel injuries for those three unlucky Sailors who are in the path of that six inch shell or anything else which they might need to cut you up and have a look inside there is a operating theater as well so if you really really are in a bad way they can open you up take out the bits that are wrong with you so you back up again and put you back on the path to recovery and with the level of supplies that's present award USS Wisconsin there's actually very few operations they can't do but of course for most of her career if there's a really really really bad thing wrong with you that they either can't handle or they don't think they can handle easily you can't always be helicoptered off to either a ship with even more extensive vertical facilities although there won't be too many of those in the fleet or Medevac out to a Shore hospital and then once you're on the road to recovery again after whatever ails you there's this observation and Recovery award where you can stay for a little bit until they kick you out back to your bunk once you're fit enough to travel the relatively short distance to your accommodation and over here on the left is what I presume is one of the ship's original medical staff who just never got told that the ship had been decommissioned and has just sat around there waiting for new patients and now we come into Broadway now we've actually passed through Broadway a few times during this little tour obviously to get access to things like the Machinery spaces but at this point I can stop and show you what is found along the corridors because it's not just a big open passageway used for the movement of shells and so forth this for example is an energy generation and distribution grid and this has sections for the starboard fire main the main drainage on the starboard side and lower down the same systems on the port side and the various cutouts and cross connections so if something's gone wrong and water's coming in or there's a fire you can activate various systems to try and deal with it and or cross-connect various systems that might have been otherwise cut off by that incident from this panel and there are various others like it which control various systems scattered all along Broadway and I must say I really like just the sheer kinetic value of these handles there's absolutely no question once you've thrown one of these things that this system has been activated or deactivated Mrs Jack being with me at the time took this rather Nice Shot looking all the way down Broadway and you can see there I'm just about to disappear through down into one of the Machinery spaces above you can see that sectional I-beam track which is used for the passage of shells and charges up and down between the various magazines it's in sections of course because there are water type bulkheads that seal off so you need to be able to remove those sections to allow the ship to become watertight but when you're not at General quarters and you want to move stuff around this is what you would actually use to move the aforementioned shells and or charges and or anything else you might need to move up and down this Corridor with so these are a pair of overhead chain Falls and as you can see they are attached to the rail above and then you lash up bind or hook or whatever form of attachment you were going to use for the particular thing at hand your particular item that needed transporting or perhaps a carry case for that item and then once it's all been lashed up and winched up to a correct height it's much much easier to move it along than you know trying to get a couple of people well more than a couple of people I would say uh quite a few people to try and deadlift uh well over two thousand pound AP shell and one of the main reasons for using this system rather than some kind of cart system apart from the fact it is just a little bit easier generally is as we mentioned that the reason that overhead rail system occasionally cuts and has to be reinstalled when the ship is not at condition zebra is the fact that you have all these hatchways doors whatever you want to call them going through which of course the lower Edge is you know six inches to a foot off of the deck level in order to forestall flooding and so anything that's Wheeling itself along the ground would have to be lifted up and over every time you got to one of those places whereas with this system once you've popped those removable bits of beam in you can just run the whole thing end to end without impediment and as you can see here since the Wisconsin is not at General quarters and all of those set these various uh doors are open you can see the little removable beam sections have been put in so you can see how the Run Works down the length of the ship you'll also see quite a lot of these things now yes the big coil is a coil of electrical cable but on the right you'll see this little circular item with a three plug set so three little ports and this is an incredibly important part of the ship's damage control efforts because of course the sections of the ship's power grid might go down when the ship is hit and damaged but since a lot of the systems you need to control that damage whether those be pumps for pumping water out of the ship pumps for pumping water into the ship to be sprayed on Fires um or anything else that you might need even down to electric lighting all of that leads as the name suggests electrical power unless you're going to bring in one of those portable diesel powered pumps and if the grid is down that's what these are for so these cables you would plug in and each of the colors corresponds to a specific slot in this terminal and then you can run that Cable forward or aft as necessary or an even longer cable if you want and you can plug it into another section another plug which is identical and that then connects the two together with a lot of power hence how thick the cables are and why it's so important to get them in the right order and that will bypass the section of Grid or a part of the section of the grid which is offline so you can essentially rewire the ship on the fly if absolutely necessary which is a very handy feature to have because it means that even if the main power to the ship is down in a certain area a lot of the systems that are in that area that could be of great help to you can be made operational again without having to actually go through the business of repairing all the complex electrical wire paths that were there when they got hit another neat little feature a little bit away from Broadway are these things the things with the Zed on them now those are cover plates for the scuttles or portholes in which you can see just there on the top left hand in fact on the top right and you can see from the indicator that when the ship is in position why or condition Yankee then this is fine you can have that out looking out into wherever it is that particular little bit of glass looks out too but if the ship goes to condition Zulu well that bit of glass is a weakness and that bit of glass might turn into a lot of very nasty sharp flying shrapnel if a explosion occurs nearby and so you have these plates that can be dropped over and then secured in place which will obviously stop the glass from coming in and doing horrible things to you and also provide a slightly greater measure of protection and of course watertight ceiling because if there is a blast even if the metal catches the glass you of don't want water to come in either because if the ship is flooding some of these might be submerged or you know the splashes of incoming rounds might put water in and all sorts of things you don't want to happen but of course as you can see these are removable so you can set the ship back to more light and air when there is no action going on and that's actually quite an advanced feature something you might not necessarily appreciate about a lot of Warships because for example an HMS Belfast when she went to war in 1939 all of her scuttles were just plated over and that was it they weren't removed until after the end of World War II and in fact when she got later refits one of the special advances that she got was open and shuttable Scuttle covers so on Wisconsin however those seem to come as standard and another feature about Wisconsin which I actually really like um and which I've seen on one or two other of the US Museum ships is this now you might think Direct that's just a TV screen it is just a TV screen but it was a number of you have said in the comments in various ones of these US tour videos and other museumship talk videos you can't get to the ships for whatever reason too far usually um and so these videos kind of help you to take a look around the ship without having to be there which is fine but some of you have also mentioned that for whatever reason uh whether that be age or infirmity you wouldn't be able to navigate your way around the ships anyway even if you can actually physically get there now they have taken account of this aboard Wisconsin so what this TV screen is is the base form of a way in which those with Mobility impairments can still come on board the ship they can access the bits from that they can or roughly off speaking on the main or upper decks and then if they have people with them who want to go off elsewhere or if they're just on their own this system allows them to have a look around the rest of the ship because there's this whole network of CCTV cameras there and then you can pick up and highlight specific areas to have a look at and then if there are people obviously having a tour down there one of the docents is talking you can then listen in to what the docent is saying aboard Wisconsin as you can see they call it the Seer the ship experience access room monitor so that's the monitor there and as you can see there are a total of 20 cameras overlooking various sections that are quite popular but can only be accessed by ladders or stairs so if you do have some kind of mobility issue and you happen to be in the air and you want to visit Nauticus and USS Wisconsin there is a bit more to experience than just the immediately accessible area of the ship for you so I thought that was quite a nice touch specifically because as somebody who grew up with a paraplegic mother I'm a q aware of the various issues that come with having somebody around who can't go everywhere that someone with all four functioning limbs care and with that it's time to bring our somewhat Whirlwind tour of USS Wisconsin to an end as with most of these other Museum ships there are a few other areas that I can show you in a later video the cic for example other details of Escape Routes some more of the Machinery spaces the upper decks etc etc but we don't want to keep these videos to roughly a decent time and well there's a whole slew of stuff from the Fire Control Systems as well but I am trying to bring you a special on us Fire Control Systems at some point later on this year so with all that said thank you very much once again to the wonderful staff and docents aboard USS Wisconsin and part of Nauticus oh based over there in Norfolk on the East Coast if you happen to be in the area please do drop by and say hello buy a hat or something I collect hats from all the ships that I've visited so that's always fun and that rounds out the US 2022 tour at least as far as ships go on the day that I visited Wisconsin there were still three or four days left in the US but one or two of those shall remain classified for the time being and another one you saw much much earlier which was the visit up in Maryland where I managed to fire amongst other things a 50 cal Browning so you can go back and look through for that in earlier videos nonetheless it's on to further videos about the Canadian tour and of course uh some of the other stuff I've seen on subsequent visits to the states and by the time all of that's wrapped up it'll be time to start uploading stuff from the September 2023 US tour so well and this year's Australian tour so that'll be fun 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: 49,755

Keywords: wows, world of warships, Iowa class, Norfolk, USS Wisconsin, WW2, Korean War, Pacific Campaign, USS Kentucky

Id: RFa99d7OJik

Length: 45min 25sec (2725 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 12 2023