What a viable Béarn carrier rebuild needs
A carrier-rebuild answer puts speed first, then flight-deck and recovery improvements.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Complete directory
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Explore every watch point in reverse video-date order, then in timestamp order within each video.
An 18-inch-gun Queen Elizabeth fleet
Giving the Queen Elizabeth class 18-inch guns creates a chain of consequences for later British capital ships, German responses and treaty limits.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
How late-war air defence changes attack tactics
Against 1944-standard ship defences, fighter strafing and rockets would probably appear before a wholesale shift to night attack.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
An 18-inch Revenge class would favour six guns and speed
A cheaper follow-on to 28-knot, 18-inch Queen Elizabeths would probably retain their layout and speed while accepting a six-gun main battery.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Nelson's Navy through objects and frigates
Gareth Glover's Nelson's Navy in 100 Objects is recommended as an engaging route into the ships, weapons and careers of the age of sail.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Why frigate commanders resisted reassignment
Many frigate commanders fought assignments that would take them away from the independent, prize-earning commands they valued.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Savonarola, the French invasion and Medici collapse
The Pope's Greatest Adversary links Savonarola's prophecies to Charles VIII's 1494 invasion and Piero de' Medici's political collapse.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Hetzer as history and modelling reference
Hetzer: The Jagdpanzer 38 Tank Destroyer combines operational background, photographs and model comparisons for readers who want an accurate build reference.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
A Hawkeye-style Nimrod AEW still faces range limits
A Hawkeye-style radar arrangement might improve the Nimrod AEW concept, but endurance and later replacement by E-7 remain open issues.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Nimrod MRA4 worked, but nineteen were too few
Nimrod MRA4 did not still need to be made workable; the objection is its cancellation and inadequate planned fleet.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Justinian II, Carthage and Byzantine recovery
A focused Justinian II biography opens into the uncertain evidence around Carthage, fleets and Byzantine Africa.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Why Canada converted Britannias for ASW
The choice between converted Britannias and buying Shackletons is framed as industrial capability as well as employment.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
War games against the U-boat threat
Simon Parkin's A Game of Birds and Wolves is recommended for its account of the Western Approaches Tactical Unit and the stakes of the convoy war.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Osprey Campaign books as concise starting points
Osprey's Campaign series is an accessible first step into a battle or operation rather than a final comprehensive account.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
An ASW superpower still needs defined limits
A fanciful question about seeing underwater becomes a lesson in specifying sensor range, depth and information value before assigning a naval role.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
VC10 military conversions lacked a customer, not airframes
Apart from the tanker role, proposed VC10 military applications failed through limited institutional interest rather than a shortage of airframes.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Greece Against Rome and the Hellenistic kingdoms
Philip Matyszak's Greece Against Rome broadens the story beyond Greece to the successor kingdoms whose civil wars and succession crises eased Roman expansion.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Why city control should shape recruitment in historical games
The original Rome: Total War ties recruitment to control of the city that can raise those troops.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Why Philip and Alexander left Sparta alone
Conquering Sparta offered too little value, and Macedon had more effective ways to neutralize it than direct battle.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
New Zealand's battlecruiser as public spectacle
Matthew Wright's Battlecruiser New Zealand shows how a warship tour could bind naval power, local identity and imperial politics together.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Bar Kokhba begins with Hadrian's mobile empire
Lindsay Powell's Bar Kokhba establishes the revolt's imperial setting through Hadrian's travelling court, provincial discipline, diplomacy and visit to Palmyra.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
If Australia and New Zealand retained battlecruisers
The treaty response to Australasian battlecruisers depends on whether they count as independent national fleets or remain part of Royal Navy strength.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Muskets, cutlasses and boarding pikes at sea
The search for the most-used naval small arm ranges from long-serving firearms to cutlasses and boarding pikes adapted for confined shipboard fighting.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
The Usurpers tests King Stephen's title
The Usurpers compares contested medieval accessions and argues that Stephen took a crown already designated for Empress Matilda.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
How late did boarding pikes remain aboard warships?
HMS Warrior is offered as a likely late formal carrier of boarding pikes, with the caveat that later ships may have retained similar weapons unofficially.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Book bans can strengthen the ideas they target
Confident institutions teach competing accounts and let students reason, while suppression advertises fear and gives a forbidden work greater power.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Airbus military concepts lacked an RAF requirement
British military A300 and A310 ideas remained think-tank or company proposals because the RAF had not adopted the requirement and the aircraft did not fit its needs.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Royal Mysteries compares the falls of Edward II and Richard II
Timothy Venning's Royal Mysteries uses Richard II's overthrow to compare royal favourites, aristocratic reaction, tyranny and contested succession across two reigns.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Armoured cruisers on the road to Dreadnought
British armoured cruisers show the hull form and gun-layout ideas from which a fast all-big-gun capital ship could develop.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
The Queen Bee predates modern drone enthusiasm
A reference to the interwar Queen Bee reminds viewers that remotely controlled aircraft have a much longer naval history than modern language suggests.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Why Trafalgar to Dreadnought forms a useful century
The century from Trafalgar to Dreadnought provides a coherent story of transformation, while the later period is clearer when divided at Vanguard.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
The Azores as an Atlantic strategic hinge
Atlantic Linchpin explains why the Azores mattered to aviation, replenishment, diplomacy and sovereignty in two world wars.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Historical frameworks should open discussion
Critical race theory provides an example of why readers should consult underlying scholarship and treat frameworks as openings for evidence-based discussion.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Good historical translation preserves meaning, not only words
What a translated history loses depends on the translator's command of both languages, the subject and the nuance that a literal rendering may miss.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Shipwreck history as a family debate
Richard Jones's 50 Greatest Shipwrecks is valued less as a final canon than as a lively prompt to compare losses and remember overlooked wrecks.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
American tanks through design, production and combat
Michael Green's United States Tanks and Tank Destroyers of the Second World War combines photographs, design context and soldiers' judgments of American equipment.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
What purpose-built carrier design makes possible
A designer working from a liner conversion would see a Nimitz-class carrier as evidence of what construction from scratch can achieve.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Two books on naval aviation's wartime evolution
David Hobbs's Taranto and Rod Macdonald's Task Force 58 make a paired study of carrier warfare in the Mediterranean and Pacific.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Where Japan's B-65 super cruisers might fit
Japan's planned B-65 large cruisers are assessed as resource-dependent ships that could provoke an Alaska-class response and support heavier battle groups.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
A surviving pre-dreadnought still deters raiders
Even an obsolete pre-dreadnought could escort convoys and pose an unattractive gunnery problem to a surface raider.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Short-term thinking and the LCS problem
A question about US naval short-termism distinguishes political funding cycles from procurement concepts that rapidly lose their rationale.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Why navies kept obsolete ironclads
Keeping old ships in commission could preserve trained crews and sea experience while fame made individual survivors harder to discard.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Read naval exercise successes in context
Successful exercise attacks on Pearl Harbor, Malta, Gibraltar or Alexandria are useful warnings, but their rules and context determine what they prove.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Riverine warfare lacks a single general history
A reading question exposes the difficulty of finding one history that connects river and lake warfare across different conflicts.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
A research route for Royal Navy pensions
Simon McLean is the recommended guide to the literature, and tontines probably were not a normal Royal Navy pension arrangement.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
A Bay-class successor with broader utility
A Bay-class replacement would probably continue the landing-ship-dock concept while taking on a more general-purpose role.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Museum ships preserve most major propulsion stages
Britain's surviving museum ships collectively illustrate most major propulsion developments after sail, though not every minor variation.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·
Naval nuclear propulsion depends on fuel policy
A question about nuclear-submarine exports turns on the trade-off between refuelling infrastructure and finite high-enriched-uranium supply.
From 21 Christmas Books for 2021 - Bruships 59: Books & Naval History Chat ·