Saturday, March 21, 2009

Brassey's drawings

I first saw the old Brassey's (The Naval Annual) back in the mid-1960's. I had already seen the older Jane's, and I was amazed at the variation in quality of the ship drawings. They range from having been drawn from original plans, and showing accurate bulkheads and machinery positions to crude diagrammatic representations that are not to any scale. In the 1894 Brassey's, the ships named there as "Catherine II", "Tchesma", and "Sinope" have an accurate inboard profile and plan view. Just before, there is a crude diagram for the ship called there "Admiral Nachimoff" (drawings 63 and 64).