Exploring the Battleship Bismarck ｜ Ship Explorer

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm your friend Mike Brady from Ocean Liner Designs. Or should I say your friend Capitan Leutnant Mike Brady from Ocean Liner Designs, because today we are standing on the decks of rather a famous ship. Now this is part of the Virtual Experience Virtual Museum video game that we've been working on secretly in the background. This is one of my favourite ships of all time. I'm sure many of you, just like me, were raised at a time when... Well, if it wasn't Discovery Channel or the History Channel playing one of those Bismarck documentaries, then if you're of a slightly older generation, then at least you grew up watching Sink the Bismarck. So we are very, very excited to give you the opportunity to actually walk on Bismarck. So we are here at the Folk's Hall. This is going to be a very quick tour of the ship, because this is from our game, Ship Explorer. Ship Explorer is coming out in July. Bismarck is coming out later on in August. So this is all very much a work in progress. It's still quite early, we're fixing up a lot of things. But I thought I'd show you a little look around, because again, if you're anything like me, and if you're watching this channel, chances are you are, then you grew up making models of ships like the Bismarck. You know, when it's like a 1350 Tamiya model kit, that's like that big, that big, doesn't quite do it justice then, you know, like as opposed to actually standing underneath this thing. Seeing it from these perspectives is very, very cool. So we're going to trace out a path up towards the bridge, have a look around. But the first thing that you are struck by is like, how big all this stuff is. I suppose, you know, looking at photographs, that quite really doesn't justice, does it? We have given Bismarck a special feature, that I'm going to do a couple of times in this video. I'm going to do it right now. If you hit the special feature button, this happens. A little bit of theatre for you, why not? The guns do work! So, you know, these are the big French 80mm main cannons, and they're, you know, paired in four turrets. We have videos coming out about Bismarck that are quite in-depth, that will explain more of what you're going to see here. That was something that I mandated had to be included. The spinning of the main guns. And of course, if we keep walking along the port side here, we'll encounter more and more of the secondaries, things like that. But let's go up top and get a bit of a better view. I love these angles, look at that. No one has seen that view since 1941. That is so spooky. So, the battleship was obviously... Sorry, I'm getting distracted walking around my own ship. Bismarck was obviously quite a threat to the Royal Navy at the time. She was a pretty well-built warship, pretty well designed. But she's kind of gathered this myth, you know, this kind of legendary status that, in some cases, kind of isn't very well-earned, you know. She has been kind of built up to be something that the battleship really wasn't. We know that at the outbreak, really in the Second World War, battleships were basically superfluous. I mean, they could do some great fire support stuff. Unopposed, they were quite powerful. But the truth is, you know, aircraft had really risen to become a much greater threat than probably had been originally envisaged at the start of the war. And what's really interesting, I guess, is one of the things that you see on Bismarck is how limited her anti-aircraft armament is. So, you know, there are the big 37mm anti-aircraft guns. They're pretty ineffective, you know. The 20mm, also pretty ineffective. Even those flak veerlings, where are they? We can go up and have a look in a minute, but there's like these four-barreled 20mm anti-aircraft guns that, you know, it just wasn't enough for this ship. Then these secondary guns, I think they were 10cm? 10.5cm? Around there. You know, they relied on this electronic mount that often didn't work. It was a real maintenance hassle. And so, you know, there were some pretty serious flaws with the ship. Also, you know, some inherent design issues that we'll talk about another time. But still a very capable warship, as we know. You know, she sank Hood. You know, it was either Bismarck or the Prince of Oregon, which we can actually see over there off in our starboard side, in station with us, hit the Prince of Wales in the engagement with Hood. And of course, sank Hood. So, you know, very capable warship. But not like the ultimate warship of the Second World War. So we're standing on one of the retractable bridge wings. This is the one over on the starboard side. This is the ship's essentially main bridge structure up here. So this is where Captain Lindemann would have been commanding this ship and overseeing operations. I feel like this is a great vantage point to fire off another salvo. So why don't we go ahead and do that while we're talking about the different structures that we're looking at? Up here, you can see the Admiral's Bridge. Of course, Bismarck, being a pretty serious capital ship, needed an Admiral's Bridge for fleet operations. I'm going to stop talking for a minute so we can watch this. That never gets old. So, you know, Captain Lindemann's remit is essentially making sure his ship is running as effectively, as efficiently as possible as a fighting machine. Whereas Admiral Lutyens' role up here on the Admiral's Bridge is to make sure that the fleet, you know, under his command, whether it just be Bismarck and Prinz Eugen or whether it be, you know, if any other destroyers or warships were on station, he needed a good command post to see what was going on and actually officiate the proceedings. So we're just one deck higher now up near the forward rangefinder. So these were the main fire control, essentially, stations for the warship. She had three of them. So there were two forward, this one included, and then one aft towards the stern. And you can also see that she's equipped with the radar. I think it was Fumo 27 radar on the forward facing aspect of the rangefinder unit. But the Fumo units hadn't really been tested with live fire exercises. They had been tested with dummy rounds and not with actual live munitions, which meant that in the field, in combat, Bismarck accidentally knocked her own radar out purely from firing her main guns. So we'll come up to the Admiral's Bridge real quick and get a really nice view of the ship's funnel. We're actually in the process of updetailing this model. So this is an old funnel that we've completely replaced. We'll have the new version of it in soon. That will be significantly more detailed. But you can see down here below a big selection of boats that all do different things. In Ship Explorer, you can actually walk up and interact with items. You can see there's like this little white circle there. You can go up and click on that and it will tell you exactly what that is because all of these boats do different things, basically. But to give you some perspective on the size of this warship, each one of those boats is the size of like a decently sized yacht today. A big pleasure yacht, you know, and they weigh tons and tons and tons. So Bismarck is a very big warship. She's just a little bit smaller in length than some of the big liners like Titanic and what have you. So a very decently sized warship. It's so cool getting to walk around and see some of these angles because again, like a lot of these viewpoints haven't been seen since May in 1941 when she was destroyed. So we're standing just behind the funnel now and you can see the platform, the catapult for the ship's Arado seaplanes. So she had her main hangar in here. You can see there's the hangar door that could slide over. It's just below the ship's builder's plaque there. But she also had these hangars here on either side of the funnel. There were some auxiliary hangars port and starboard and then above, a crane whose purpose it was was to actually come out and pick the seaplanes up from the funnel's hangars and then slide them over. They could be put on the catapult, fired off, sent out to do reconnaissance, check out what was going on, hunt for targets, and then when the seaplanes came back they could taxi essentially alongside and it was up to this big crane here, a big 12 ton crane I think, to go over and pick them up. The problem is though, they had a lot of problems with these cranes. I believe, actually here's an interesting link, that the company that made these cranes was the same company that made the main floating crane that built Olympic and Titanic and Britannic over in Belfast, at Isle of Wulf. They had some issues with the electronics because as you can see it's, we're kind of like falling into the catapult, as you can see it's like kind of open and the ocean is right there. There's not a lot of freeboard, as I understand it, these cut in and out and drove the German crew kind of mad throughout Bismarck's relatively short career. So we're going to keep walking further off now towards the rear battery turrets, Caesar and Bruno. So yeah, all four turrets had a name, A and B, C and D, Anton, Bertha, Caesar or Kaiser I think it would be pronounced in German, and then Dora. One of the things that's really interesting about Bismarck actually is how much open deck space there is, and again you don't really get a sense for this from photographs or plans until you actually walk on the ship and see it for yourself. So you can see for example things like stacked yellow life rafts that would have been used because you know, Bismarck didn't really have any lifeboats. It had those big ship's boats, really wouldn't be used for evacuations or anything like that. It's more of a, you know, they were functional, they did a job conveying the Admiral ashore, conveying the Captain, that kind of thing. You know, in the event of a sinking, you're kind of hoping for rescue from nearby units. So proper lifeboats weren't really considered. Why don't we fire off another salvo from the after end here and see what it looks like. So in Ship Explorer you can play with the weather, you can play with the time, you can kind of pose things to be exactly how you want them to look. Let's run around on this side so we can watch the gunfire. Oh, it's pretty. You can enter a third person mode which we'll do at the exact moment of firing. Wait for it. Now, excellent. So now we can fly around and look at things and have this awesome viewpoint of the guns in the exact moment of firing. To make life easier for the player at night time, we've actually covered the ship in lights. She did have these lights, you can see them on the superstructure here. She did have these, but obviously during operations when she was at sea, these would have been turned off and the ship would have been blacked out so that she couldn't be spotted. But it results in a very dark ship to walk around at night time. So we have kept them on for a bit. And one of my favorite features of Ship Explorer is that you can come up here nice and close and what we'll do, we'll mess around with like some of these features. You can put autofocus on and then dump this all the way up and you get some of these beautiful angles that you can take screenshots of. Or you can mess around with like, if we want to make it put the chromatic aberration up, you can spend hours doing this. I've lost a lot of my time playing with this. We were really keen to do Bismarck early on because she's a very interesting ship. Obviously she's got a lot of fans and it's a ship that we thought would be really cool to walk around. Because again, it's one of those ones that we've seen a lot of in paintings and drawings and plans, all this kind of stuff. Model kits. I've never actually been able to walk around. Let's go down this ladder real quick. And walk to the stern. I told you this was going to be a brief tour. We don't want to give away too many of the secrets. But some of the things going into this will include, you know, like photographs and little things hidden around to give you some incentive to do an explore and to have a look. But a lot of the main hatches, bits of equipment that are labeled so you can learn what it all does. I've learned a lot working on this ship because there are bits of it I had no idea about. And we really, really have to thank Joe Lavender, who is a historian. He's written a book about Bismarck. And in particular her, you know, commanding officers Lindemann and Lutyens. It's a fantastic one. I'll link it in the description below. It looks like actually we're sailing straight into a storm. The weather and the time is dynamic. So we can actually change if we want. Let's make it a little earlier and we'll make it just like full cloud. There we go. We'll make it a slightly nicer day to end on. Yeah, Joe has worked really tirelessly with us to highlight, you know, what all these pieces of equipment are. Let's make it partial cloud. Actually, you know what's happened is we've sailed straight into a storm. And I can't turn that off. We've sailed into a storm, folks. There's no escape. Yes, Joe. I just distracted myself so much. Wow. Well, sometimes if you sail into a storm like this, you kind of have to ride it out. Joe has worked really tirelessly with us on identifying all the pieces of equipment, all the pieces of machinery, what they all did, how useful they were, and some of those really interesting bits and pieces. So a lot of Joe's research has gone into this. And so no doubt if you're interested in the Bismarck story, as I am, getting to walk around the ship and actually learn how it worked, what all these little different pieces of equipment did, will be a really exciting experience. Because by the end of it, you really get to know the ship. And when you see documentaries of it, you see the footage, you learn about the sinking, you can almost really imagine yourself being there. And in fact, I'm not going to show it off yet, but there is a special secret level where you do get to experience Bismarck's final moments. At the very end of the last battle, when she's just about to slip under, you can walk around the ship and learn about the final gun duel and see actually some of the carnage and what happened to Bismarck in her final battle. So yeah, we cannot wait to share this with you. We've been working on it tirelessly for the last couple of months. And yeah, we're really, really excited. So I hope you guys are excited as well. So Ship Explorer is live on Steam at the moment. You can head over. I'll put the link in the description below. Go ahead and wishlist the video game. It would be a huge help for us. It supports the project. Ship Explorer will be $20 at launch with a 10% discount its first week. And the Bismarck will be coming the next month and it's going to be free. So if you buy Ship Explorer, you'll immediately get access to the SS Moray Castle and the legendary ocean liner SS United States. You'll be able to explore those and then about a month afterwards, Bismarck's going in. You don't want to miss it. You want to be able to fire the guns off. We'll end on one final gun salvo. Take it away, Bismarck. Yeah, we can't wait to get this over to you guys. Please go ahead and like the project. Wishlist it on Steam. Check out our website shipexplorergame.com for more screenshots and goodies. As always, until next time, thank you so much for joining me. Stay safe and stay happy. I'll see you again. Ladies and gentlemen, it's your friend Mike Brady from Ocean Liner Designs. Thank you so much for watching this video. If you enjoyed it, please leave a comment below. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel because we get new videos out weekly. If you want to support my work and get really cool perks like behind the scenes and early access, please visit my Patreon in the link in the description below or sign up as a YouTube member. Come and join the crew. As always, stay safe, stay happy, and I'll see you again next time.