Warship (Volume II)

I have all of these published to date. They have a very high and uniform quality of content. The each edition contains material researched by international subject matter experts. The Hosho, De Grasse, Calabria and Italian Torpedo boat articles were all very interesting. If you are a naval history and ship construction nut, there really is only one other periodical to go for this kind and quality of information. I love both.

Warship is an annually produced compilation of articles on the design, development and service hostory of the world's combat ships. The 2005 issue is one of the most interesting volumes yet. The first article is on the failure of British armor piercing big gun shells to pierce armor and then to fail to explode. It is surprising to me that such little details seemingly are ignored until a country goes to war, ships have sunk, and people have died. I was reminded of the failure of the American (and German) torpedoes to explode. After all the effort put into submarines, training the crew and sending them off to war, it appears that only one live test of a torpedo had been run and it had failed. Another article is on the early steam powered torpedo boats built by the Royal Navy in the late 1800's. These definitely do not look like they would be good boats on which to serve. I had seen pictures of them before but the article goes into things like sea keeping, and life on board as well as more technical details on the ships. The articles in this book are not short, averaging something over a dozen pages. Annual columns reviewing the navies of the world, a gallery of pictures and others take up about a quarter of the book. As usual, this is a fascinating book. It brings up points of history that aren't seen very often. It's very very well written. Highly recommended to any interested person.