‘Armoured’ and ‘Unarmoured’ Carriers – Survivability vs Strike Power DD

hello everybody I’m sure this videos bounced a few flame wars somewhere as the subject is contentious to say the least in at least a few circles on the Internet now what’s the subject you asked well for those of you from register each this point without notice in the video title the subject is the merits of the so-called British armored carrier approach versus the so-called American unarmored carrier of the Second World War now let’s start off by pointing out that cooling one side armored and the other

unarmored is a gross oversimplification both nations carriers were armored along the hull of the primary difference which the debate generally over revolves around is the flight deck on British carriers there are involved in this debate at least the flight deck which is the uppermost full-length deck and the one all the aircraft fly off from was also an armored deck on American carriers it wasn’t any Armour present on the horizontal plane being present much lower in the ship below the hangars it also needs to be borne in mind that

British carriers deck armor did not run the full length of the flight deck the hanger and its roof formed an armored box and the ends of the flight deck were strengthened but not fully armored and let’s also point out that there are extreme views on both sides you’re gonna have some who are gonna say oh yeah the Royal Navy was stupid their carriers were worthless they destroyed themselves and any American carrier would walk right over them and sink the big metal coffin with a single hit those people are idiots

on the other hand you have some people who will say oh well the British carriers would shrug off anything the Americans cover throw at them it doesn’t matter if 98 percent of the British Air Group is wiped out a single bomb getting through will total the fragile American bath toy and those people are also idiots what we’re going to look at is the ships in question the design choices that influence their construction the pros and cons in the most important areas and then assess the outcomes of course I have my own opinion but the

main goal of this video is to lay out the fair and allow people to make their own decisions because quite frankly not even the major naval historians are all agreed on the efficacy or not of the two nations approaches you read Brown Friedman do Lincoln gaskey or anyone a number of well-respected naval historians and every one of them has their own take on it so for me to try and say no this is the one and final and only true take on it would be hubris on a colossal scale now for the purposes of this discussion

we’re going to look at five ship classes on the Royal Navy side of things we’re going to look at hms ark royal of the illustrious and implacable classes and on the american side of things we’re going to look at the Yorktown & Essex classes as these five groups of ships are roughly contemporary and they cover the period question the original USS Wasp is discounted because she was deliberately built light to use up treaty tonnage and thus it wouldn’t be a fair example to use now the ships were designed and built in the following

order the Ark Royal followed by the Yorktown’s then the illustrious then the implacable ‘s and finally the Essex’s HMS indomitable the last of the illustrious class was something of a halfway house between without that class and implacable –zz now the first thing to note about the two navies is that their carriers were designed for primarily operating in specific environments although obviously that both navies had global commitments and this is quite telling from the start especially in the Royal Navy’s case the

American carriers were designed to operate mostly in the Pacific against Japan the Yorktown’s because at the time that Japan was considered the primary likely enemy when the okkk tails were being built and most of the Essex’s were built when Japan physically was the primary enemy in contrast the British built HMS Ark Royal when they also believed the most likely enemy was going to be Japan whereas by the time the illustrious and implacable classes came about the most likely enemy for the UK was definitely a European power

this in turn led to different priorities in the matter of self-defense a for an American carrot or the arc royal in the wide expanses of the Pacific the most likely and in most imaginable circumstances only possible enemy was going to be another carriers flight group or possibly small groups of aircraft from various small island bases as nobody expected aircraft like the zero to have arranged more comparable to a heavy bomber than a strike fighter either way such opponents would have a finite supply of aircraft that was

within the capacity of a friendly carrier to match since both sides would face similar operational constraints when it came to aircraft size and payload as such aircraft would also have a more limited form and auto torpedo load compared to heavier aircraft that could be based from major airfields on learned and any strike package would not be composed entirely of strike craft since any carrier group would also have to carry their own fighters therefore the logical concept arose that the best way to defend a carrier would be to have

the carrier equipped with the largest number of aircraft possible in order to match and hopefully overwhelm the incoming attackers who would not be able to overpower such an air group without deploying more carrier hulls to the fight than the Navy in question and the USA was pretty sure that it could out build almost any potential combination of enemies in this scenario you would either breakup and destroy incoming attacks with your own aircraft or weaken them enough that the fleet’s anti-aircraft batteries and a little bit approach and

dodging would allow the ships to evade being struck at all at which point your large air group could Massa counter-strike large enough to destroy it the enemy in the European theater with the confined waters of the Mediterranean and North Sea and the other associated areas the primary expected threat and indeed the only threat unless and until another European Navy actually built a functional aircraft carrier was a land-based aircraft these posed two significant problems above and beyond the expected opposition in the Pacific firstly in

addition to single-engine aircraft you could expect two three and four engine medium and heavy bombers carry carrying bigger bombs and more of them as well as single or multiple torpedoes perhaps more importantly with multiple full-scale airfields to operate from you could also expect assaults in overwhelming numbers he really didn’t matter if your carrier had one two or three squadrons of Fighters if the enemy turned up with half a dozen of their own fighter squadrons and the same again his strike aircraft assuming

the competence of your enemy was even within shouting distance of your own those attackers would get through and in fairly large numbers and at that point it would be inevitable that you would get hit so it becomes more important to protect your ship from the inevitable impact a number of American war games the fleet problems of the 1930s also seem to indicate that whoever attacked first would likely sink the enemy carrier or carriers outright and the advancing performance of aircraft in the period immediately before the invention

and deployment of ship-borne radar is specifically in the field of speed seemed to indicate to both navies that a carrier’s own fighters would be likely unable to intercept incoming attacks unless they were already airborne for some reason the lessons drawn from this are getting quite different with the Americans concluding that the biggest strike group possible would allow them to do as much damage as possible ideally before the enemy found them and if not then at least do more damage than the loss of their own carriers would entail

the British perhaps more pessimistically concluded that outside of enough fighters for a combat air patrol the main emphasis should be on surviving the inevitable in order to strike again after they’d been hit there was an additional factor whilst most carrier-based aircraft could carry 250 or 500 pound bombs learn based bombers and dive bombers could be expected to more consistently bring the thousand-pound bombs or greater into play which could not only punch deeper but carried a lot more explosive power and so the risk of fatal damage from

even one or two hits was much more significant when facing land-based opponents and of course you can’t sink an airfield which meant you could expect day after day after day of sustained attack and even if you somehow fought through a much larger land-based air defense and managed to knock out an airfield there would be half a dozen more in range and a runway was relatively easy to repair as it didn’t need to spend weeks or months heading to and from a drydock this in turn dictated the basic decision on whether or not to use an armored deck

for the illustrious and implacable glasses designed to operate in range of massed land-based air forces it was no choice at all they were going to be attacked no air group they could get on a single carrier all multiple carriers would be able to stop a massed land-based assault and you could reasonably expect to get hit as a result for the ark royal the Yorktown’s and the Essex is operating in theory far from major land-based support against more limited air groups if you could Maul one or two large strike waves you

could reasonably conclude the danger was over and it was unlikely the enemy could utter ly overwhelm you and so the flight deck was kept unarmored to maximize the air group so what impact did this and other decisions have on general operation and on the ship’s air group will now look through a number of factors that influenced a carriers air group size and strike capabilities and see how they were affected by or affected the choice of armored or unarmed flight decks so deck park’s one of the other major differences in

various ships early operational careers was the use of deck parks this is where a portion of your aircraft are stored on the flight deck instead of in the hangar for the American carriers this was pretty much a given an increased number of operational aircraft that could be carried simply because of the additional storage space this offered aircraft are of course full of things that like to burn and explode but with a flight deck that offered little resistance to bombs it scarcely made much difference where

the aircraft were when a bomb hit in fact having them on the deck was in some cases safer since the burning aircraft could be shoved overboard if they caught fire whereas the same aircraft on fire in the hangar was a much more complex in deadly issue there was also the weather in the vast expanses of the Pacific apart from the occasional typhoon the sea was usually relatively speaking fairly calm and storing aircraft on deck pose little risk of damage or loss in the north sea on the other hand aircraft on deck could reasonably be expected to

either fall or be washed overboard or damaged or even torn free by these fairly regular storms and heavy seas encountered the Mediterranean was usually a little karma but when it got rough which it did on a regular basis it got really rough and being an enclosed body of water there were precious few places you could actually go whereas in the Pacific you could usually avoid a typhoon if you were given enough warning this meant that regardless of hangar storage space an equal sized American carrier would typically be able to carry

more aircraft in total at the risk of losing some of its air group it especially bad weather the extreme of this was seen in the aftermath of one of the major typhoons that hit the Pacific Theater toward the end of World War two a number of American carriers had lost significant numbers of aircraft and the lighter built flight decks of some ships had also suffered significant structural damage at roll halsy seeing the state of his own ships signaled the nearby ships of the British Pacific Fleet to report their status in the aftermath of the

typhoon HMS indefatigable whose armored hangar enclosed bow and flight deck had withstood the whole thing just fine rather cheeky signaled back what typhoon now we look at hangers these were particularly affected by design choices American carriers tended to go for a so-called open hanger and the British armored carriers for a closed hanger in small part due to the weather but in larger part due to the nature of the flight deck an armored flight deck needed plenty of support and the sides were necessarily therefore part of the

hull which meant they and their support beams etc were considerably thicker and would take up more space which also limited available volume but provided greater safety assuming that the flight deck Armour held since all sides of the hanger were also armored to protect against splinters blast shells and gunfire also factored into this was hanger height at the time that they were designed they would of course fit the aircraft being used but if they were built only just tall enough then future aircraft might not fit in the British

carriers case due to the space and weight constraints imposed by the defensive systems including the armor the hangar Heights were generally lower and this would prevent them from operating some modern types of aircraft later in their lives interestingly a whilst the Yorktown illustrious and Essex all went with a single hangar with the illustrious having a hangar about three foot lower than the American ships the Ark Royal indomitable and the implacable ‘he’s actually had two hangar decks although in the latter both decks

were only fourteen foot high compared to just over seventeen foot in the American ships the illustrious single hangar was actually about four-fifths the floor space of a Yorktown and the indomitable and implacable had more space than the American design but the deck part of the Yorktown’s allowed for a greater overall number of operational aircraft could be carried in practice with of course the essex taking the biscuit and the cake as well with the most operational aircraft plus plenty of spare parts including

aircraft bodies although interestingly enough with the deck pock involved implacable actually becomes the most efficient ship in terms of aircraft carrier her tongue likely due to that second hangar assuming they will fit of course it does bear mentioning that the number of aircraft aboard US carriers was often to various degrees of variance with the number of operational aircraft due to the practice of carrying spare aircraft lashed up to the hangar roof in various states of assembly whereas the British went for the unicorn

class of support carriers to deal with the repair and resupply of aircraft issue for example at one point in her career Yorktown notionally carried 88 aircraft but 22 of these were non operational spares with 66 in flying condition but at other times she would appear to carry fewer aircraft but would actually be capable of flying more now the aircraft themselves the aircraft obviously used by the Feres navy’s also bear some relevance to their own full capacity towards the end of the war Avengers and Corsairs and other similar

aircraft will come and in both navies carriers but the United States Navy had much better folding wing designs for its carrier aircraft and this was especially telling at the start of the war when the two navies operated very different aircraft the British tending to have aircraft that folded their wings around and back whilst American aircraft folded their wings straight up taking advantage of their tall hangars additionally American carrier aircraft tended to be slightly smaller than their British counterparts

which further helped get more aircraft into a limited space the Wildcat and dauntless for example were both smaller than the full bar and skewer which were their Royal Navy contemporaries only American torpedo bombers the Devastator and the avenger tended to be slightly larger compared to their equivalents the swordfish and barracuda and usefully for the United States Navy torpedo bombers that were carried in smaller numbers compared to dive bombers and fighters in both Navy ships overall then the aircraft operated meant that for a given

amount of space the Americans would usually be able to get a few more aircraft in compared to the British at least until they started using broadly the same machines now let’s look at the anti-aircraft armament part of the space and weight allotment of any carrier of this period is made up of its anti-aircraft battery now using the ships designed anti-aircraft arm we can see where the priorities of the two navies lay now obviously all carriers would receive upgrades and additional guns in later life but this

is for obvious reasons in excess of what they were designed for what’s interesting is that it shows that it was actually the Royal Navy and not the United States Navy which placed far more emphasis on the ship being able to defend itself when you look at the total anti-aircraft suite both counting and discounting light anti-aircraft up to 20 millimeter which gradually became obsolete during the war both in terms of overall number of gun barrels and in gun power per turn the Royal Navy is significantly ahead even comparing to

classes built with some wartime experience that being the implacable Zand the Essex now you can argue the particular effectiveness of any given anti-aircraft gun for hours on end the machine guns and 1.1 inch guns on earlier carriers being found rather wanting and replaced with a variety of 40 millimeters whether that’s Bofors or pom-poms and 20-millimeter Oerlikons in later ships but it is clear that from an as designed a viewpoint the Royal Navy was clearly expecting it ships that have to defend themselves as well as protect

themselves separate from their groups far more than the United States Navy was this additional commitment to anti-aircraft defense with all the associated weight ammunition extra crew quarters and other material and stores would of course eat into the carrier’s capacity to operate and carry aircraft now let’s have a look at the ship’s size one thing that’s not always appreciated is the size of the various carriers people tend to assume that they’re all roughly the same but this is far from the truth American carriers tended to draw less

water and be slightly narrower at the waterline but also be considerably longer a displacement also varies with Yorktown standard displacement being the smallest by quite a margin and the essex the heaviest by an even bigger margin the greater volumetric density due to the armor and heavy anti-aircraft batteries on the British carriers can be seen from the fact that although the three British glasses ranged from just over 2,000 tons to four thousand tons heavier they were all considerably shorter than the Yorktown’s

and vastly shorter than the much heavier Essex’s this difference in physical dimensions especially length that was possible due to their lighter construction would allow American ships more space and hence more aircraft per ton in the orc towns the sectional density of the essex-class was much higher though on a par with the British ships but it did have a armoured hangar deck almost as thick as the British carriers flight deck which likely explains this as well as Wyatt’s aircraft per ton ratio is significantly

worse than the Yorktown’s its primary advantage over all the other carriers under construction being simple sheer size giving it more capacity regardless of any other factors since the Essex is even in their shorter version were designed with about 4,000 tons more displacement than the next largest carrier under construction in the two navies and finished up with a standard displacement that was considerably more and partly due to this they’re about 100 feet longer than the British armored carriers and almost as

wide this isn’t to say that the Essex is weren’t a good design they very definitely were but at the same time you would expect a ship several thousand tons heavier and 100 feet longer to be a better carrier even if it was only an average design so its margin of superiority over everything else is not exactly surprising now let’s look at ships durability this is where most of the arguments about the two design philosophies tend to circulate there are actually really three forms of durability to consider which often gets

overlooked one is tactical durability this is basically if you hit the ship can it come through with its protection system either avoiding or minimizing the damage to the extent that the ship can either continue immediate tactical operations or can be brought back up to operational status in good time if the ship fails this test then you have to move on to to survivable durability this is if a ship takes a hit and is knocked out of action through severe damage the ship survived long enough to reach homeport and be brought back into action

through a drydock this also covers at the lower end damage that knocks the ship out of meaningful action for most or all of the current tactical operation even if some form of operational capability is restored later at the higher end it covers the scenario of the ship basically being a floating wreck but the key part being floating a damaged ship of after all can be repaired a ship that sinks or is otherwise irrecoverable is a total loss and finally you have three strategic durability this is assuming that the

ship is so badly damaged it requires Dockyard time this aspect covers how long it needs in the dock comparable to the attack directed at it and also how the attack fundamentally affects the ship in question in later operations for example if the ship is torpedoed but after repairs it functions as new then it’s good in this category conversely if a ship is torpedoed in the same place by the same weapon and would now forever be restricted in top speed due to the impact warping the whole frames then the ship is fairly bad in

this category durability has to be considered on a per ship basis the total number of ships present all lined up to replace it is somewhat irrelevant again by example if you drive a car that breaks down after 24 hours and needs a week in the workshop to repair and the fact that they’re so cheap you have it doesn’t more lined up and you can just cycle through them to stay on the road doesn’t make the cars themselves particularly durable although your transport system is there has of course been much written about this some good

and some horribly slanted in both directions some of the latter sounding very informed but mixing in outright falsehoods with a few facts so there are two main types of attack where this durability difference comes into play conventional bombing attack and kamikazes this means leaving out ships that were sunk by torpedoes gunfire etc unless they were also attacked other ways previously in which case how they held up under that assault is relevant about their loss to torpedoes is not since obviously torpedoes don’t

strike flight decks in this respect the tactical durability of the British carriers is quite startling compared to the American ships so let’s look at bomb hits first our first example the USS Hornet she was lost at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands now her sinking was down mainly to the torpedo hit she took but during the first assault we could also see that she was hit by three bombs of just over 500 pounds each plus an unintentional kamikaze as well as the torpedoes two of these bones were semi armor-piercing and both would penetrate

down two by three decks and cause major damage in total and 97 men would lose their lives to the four bomb – kamikaze impacts and the ship would be unable to continue flight operations the combined fighters of Hornet and enterprise were unable to prevent the strikes coming in and landing their blows now although it was the torpedoes in the first and second attacks that would send her to the bottom there’s no doubt that the ship would have been unable to continue operations without a major repair had the torpedoes not hit

in the same battle two hits and two near misses by similar bombs on the enterprise caused major damage 44 deaths and forced the ship to retire for repairs although she was still able to recover aircraft now enterprises constant brushes with the Imperial Japanese Navy provide a number of other examples at the Battle of eastern Solomons she took three hits from 550 pound bombs to semi armor-piercing penetrated several decks again and caused heavy damage along with a general-purpose bomb that detonated on contact with the deck alongside four

near misses in this case she was again able to recover aircraft fairly soon after the attacks at the cost of 77 dead but would eat several months of repairs to be combat capable again yorktown would lose 66 men at Coral Sea to a single penetrating hit from a 550 pound bomb that would also [ __ ] her engines and need three months to repair at Midway splinters from a detonation on deck started a fire in the hangar another hit penetrated and knocked out some of her engines and a third went through the side in the area of one of

the elevators and caused a fire collectively these brought the ship to a halt now superb damage control was bringing the ship gradually back up to operational speed and working towards a resumption of flight operations for those aircraft still on the deck when a fatal torpedo strike came in now looking at British ships HMS Illustrious would take five near misses from eleven hundred and twenty two hundred pound bombs plus a total of seven hits from a mixture of 550 and 1100 pound bombs as well as a single 2,200 pound bomb believe it or

not she was still able to operate as a carrier until the 2,200 pound bomb hit which analysis indicated only just defeated the armored deck but the hit would start fires and caused damage that put her out of action as a carrier although the damage report did note that by initiating the bomb fuse and slowing its descent at the armored deck meant the bomb exploded in the hangar and not several decks below where it could have done crippling damage illustrious would be able to make it safely under a home power back to port and she suffered 126

dead and needing a months of repairs in a number of docks not helped by the Luftwaffe bombing her while she was in her first dock before she headed to the US to finish repairs and which also that turned into a refit indomitable would take two hits and three near misses mostly from five hundred and fifty pound weapons none of which would hit the armored sections they did not carry out flight operations and kill 46 of the crew requiring several months of repairs but during the same operation a victorious was hit by

two small bombs which did hit the armored flight deck which according to the crew sent the bombs bouncing over the side like cricket balls without doing any real damage the formidable would take two hits and a near-miss from a 2,200 pound bomb but remained operational albeit that the bombs didn’t hit dead center with 12 dead from the attacks overall this brief summary would indicate that British carriers would tend to suffer fewer dead for a given weight of explosive and in some cases could stay more operational but looking

at the battles and operations where these incidents occurred they couldn’t inflict as much damage on the enemy as the American carriers did in exchange for suffering their own damage additionally given the effects of 550 pound bombs it’s doubtful that the American ships would have survived the hits that illustris suffered however due to the number of hits and the resultant overall damage taken the British ships that needed Dockyard work would need longer under repair whereas the American ships despite being more badly effected

immediately would require shorter time in dock before being back out in operational service now switching over to kamikazes both nations carriers would take multiple hits including many glancing blows that did relatively little damage however when looking at kamikazes that landed solid hits there is a major difference that becomes apparent in these attacks conditions were normally somewhat different to bombing attacks the bombs carried by the car becausehe’s tended to be around 550 pounds but their armor-piercing capacity

was somewhat diminished due to either being still attached to or only just released from the aircraft at the same time the mass of the aircraft itself and the effects of any fuels still aboard tended to add additional fire hazards to many impact every British armored carrier except for the implacable which appeared to have a charmed life would be hit by at least one kamikaze strike then some more than one however with the exception of one attack on formidable where a fragment of armor plate displaced by the bomb impact

damage some of the engines and temporarily reduced speed the summation of all of these karmic RC attacks was minimal damage caused and minimal casualties suffered with the ship’s universally back in full flight operations within hours and sometimes less with any damage repaired later on in dock once the tactical operation that the ships were taking party that had been completed conversely of the ships of the classes under consideration Enterprise Essex intrepid Randolph Ticonderoga Bunker Hill and Franklin all took kamikaze hits

that caused major damage and forced the ship’s to retire for repairs with significant casualties with Ticonderoga Bunker Hill and Franklin being preserved solely by the excellent damage control efforts of their crews in all these cases the primary difference appeared to have been the flight deck the British armored decks stopped the attacks pretty much dead on with a little damage below the flight deck level in a couple of cases attacks were listed as a glancing because the kamikazes came down solidly onto the

ship’s deck but would simply bounce or skid over the side but whereas attacks on the American carriers would either penetrate the deck or blow a large hole in it with the effect that significant damage and fire would spread into the hangar whichever was of course full of more burnable and explosive material which led to a much greater conflagration and more resultant damage Hancock appeared to have both terrible and brilliant luck at the same time being hit multiple times by fragments of kamikazes it’s a a had just about

finished to shoot down resulting in the ship never being out of action for more than a few hours overall then British carriers appear to have had significantly greater tactical survivability especially against kamikazes both nations carriers appear to have had good survival durability although the edge here would I still think go to British carriers since they tended to be stopped in the water far less often and a few losses to torpedo strikes in the United States Navy could be attributed to the ships being delayed

by such engine malfunctions and shutdowns the generally superb American damage control efforts kept a number of their ships afloat when most would have considered them lost in terms of strategic durability American ships appear to have repaired a lot faster albeit you could argue this was because if you damaged two british carrier through its armor badly enough to need dock you’d probably done a lot more damage but nevertheless neither nation lost a fleet carrier of the types considered two attacks associated with

bombs or kamikazes alone with all hull losses coming eventually from torpedo strikes evaluating from this it would seem that the British armored system was preferable from a viewpoint of keeping a ship alive and in action and the United States Navy seemed to agree since multiple reports from both front line officers and evaluations back home all had a good opinion of the survivability of the British carriers and encouraged the use of a similar system on their own ships indeed in large part because of these recommendations the Midway class and all

subsequent US carriers would have an armored flight deck of some description however the Americans did not take on board at the armored hangar box and indeed the British would also leave this behind in their post-war designs additionally a carrier surviving is only one part of its capability as an operational weapons system the discussion of armoured versus unarmored flight decks focuses on these ships themselves which for most naval ships is fine but for carriers whose primary purpose is achieved by aircraft it is

not the whole picture British carriers were limited in Air Group size and aircraft type even later when their overall air groups increased due to deck parking and other measures some of this was due to their simply being smaller ships but there was also a degree of effect from the greater weight of defensive features this meant that aircraft losses affected their overall flight group more and their overall strike power was less for example and the kamikaze attacks left the carrier’s themselves relatively fine but the

aircraft destroyed in those attacks compromised their ability to keep fighting although the flipside of that is to of course something like Bunker Hill being completely out of action or was a 100% loss of the air group however it is overall striking power that is where unsurprisingly the American carriers have an advantage you could make a pretty convincing case that the illustrious class could comfortably have survived and remained operational during the many battering zat the Hornets Yorktown and enterprise injured in the

first half of the Pacific campaign but you’d have very little chance of claiming that they would have done anywhere near the damage that the American carriers inflicted on the Imperial Japanese Navy at Coral Sea Midway santa cruz eastern Sullivans etc so at that point it’s perfectly valid to ask which is better to lose a carrier or to in exchange for destroying multiple enemy carriers or to retain all of your carriers but at the same time the enemy retains most all of their own that’s a decision that obviously everyone has to

make for themselves overall the fact that both navies would adopt elements of the others design than that being armoured flight decks in the US Navy and larger flight groups in the Royal Navy respectively amongst other things would indicate to me that the true optimum that was somewhere in the middle however based on the information provided in this video I leave it to viewers to make their own final evaluation as to which was the better weapons system or whether they were simply two sides of the same coin working towards an eventual common

purpose design 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 drydock questions