WW1 Royal Navy quality worse than the Hochseeflotte in wargames

[Sir Slash]

Do these ships blow-up by themselves or when other people are shooting at them? Either way I'd be upset but maybe somebody should check the, "Smoking Rules" to see if they need adjustments.  ;D  Historically, I don't think the whole cordite problem thing didn't come about until later, maybe 1912 or so?

[MengJiao]

Do these ships blow-up by themselves or when other people are shooting at them? Either way I'd be upset but maybe somebody should check the, "Smoking Rules" to see if they need adjustments.  ;D  Historically, I don't think the whole cordite problem thing didn't come about until later, maybe 1912 or so?

  These ships were under fire, but the spontaeous propellant explosions bring up an interesting problem since most of the ships that blew up were not RN ships.  I'm not sure how far back in time the spontaneious propellant explosions go but the French battleship Liberte blew up in 1911 and I think there were earlier propellant explosions -- around 20 in all by say 1920.

[Sir Slash]

What got the Maine? Was that propellant or coal?

[MengJiao]

What got the Maine? Was that propellant or coal?

Seems a little early for a classic propellant explosion.

[Gusington]

IIRC The Maine blew up from an ignition in its coal chamber. Or a Spanish bomb, if you're feeling...yellow.

[Sir Slash]

That sounds like a good way to start a war to me.

[MengJiao]

IIRC The Maine blew up from an ignition in its coal chamber. Or a Spanish bomb, if you're feeling...yellow.

  In either case the propellant magazine blew up right away.  I don't know what kind of propellant it used.

[Gusington]

IIRC it was coal.

[besilarius]

This seems like a good place to alert all Grogs that Norman Friedman's bible, Naval Firepower, is online.

https://books.google.fr/books?id=h5m9AwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr#v=onepage&q&f=false

[MengJiao]

This seems like a good place to alert all Grogs that Norman Friedman's bible, Naval Firepower, is online.

https://books.google.fr/books?id=h5m9AwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr#v=onepage&q&f=false

Nice!

[GaryMc]

IIRC it was coal.

Last I read, the theory was a bit more complex than that.  It's been a few years, but it was a case with multiple moving parts.  The US used a grade of coal at the time which had a tendency towards spontaneous combustion if left alone for too long.  The Maine had been loaded with coal, and then sat and cooled its heels (I think in Key West, but not 100%) while Washington monitored the situation.  Then, the Maine was ordered to Havana, and that's not much of a hop, and certainly  not enough to empty out the bunker. 

The running theory is that there was a coal fire  in a bunker which was next to one of the magazines (the secondary magazine IIRC, but I don't have the book in front of me.)  The Captain of the ship reported an hour or so before the explosion that he'd gone down a corridor with had a bulkhead on the bunker, and he put his hand against the bulkhead and felt nothing unusual, but on the other hand, he is just slightly biased.

The thing that really threw the first investigators is that the keel plates of the Maine were bent inwards, not outwards as you would expect from an internal explosion.  That's why the mine theory got so much traction back in the day.  More recent computer modeling suggests that the keel was close enough to the bottom of the harbor for the shock wave to reflect back up into the ship, bending the plates back in.


ETA: it's been a long time since I read on this, but the above was taken from my memories of reading

https://www.amazon.com/War-Spain-1898-David-Trask/dp/0803294298/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1546487780&sr=8-1&keywords=trask+spanish+american+war