The Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe, in his celebrated play, Dr. Faustus, wrote of a mythic age, when a thousand warships were launched to grab back Helen, the most beautiful woman. Here at Shipsearcher, the Ship Identification Section (SIS) can’t tell you if any of that happened in distant antiquity – satellite imagery of the Trojan War is poor, to say the least! We can tell you that we’ve now launched over a thousand warshipviews and loaded these in our Google Earth satellite imagery database!
With the recent pages for the Norwegian, German, Danish, and Dutch navies, we have now found more than 1,100 warships using open satellite imagery! A project that began as a quick look at active and retired United States Navy carriers has now documented 27 World navies, from the largest carriers to museum and sail training ships.
The resource has a total of 198 pages: Navy index pages (found under shipsearcher menu above) and sub-categories of warships. This includes the stand-alone pages for supercarrier scrapping and Chinese island fortress construction, and the page on terms of use and sources for our images, which also explains how we go about trying to identify ships. Using the search window at right can trawl up some interesting results across pages. For example searches for unique ship types such as hydrofoils, museum ships or wrecks will guide you to the relevant pages. Just do a “control F” search in the page to get to the ship.
So what are some of the most interesting or odd captures we’ve located out there in the wild World? Check out below, where we’ve loaded captions with links to posts and pages to keep exploring the database. It’s a hyperlink-rich environment, folks, so click often and please share!
The commissioned Greek warship HS Olympias, a reconstruction of an ancient Trireme. We couldn’t read her pennant number or deck code letters…but we’re pretty sure about this ID!The largest submarine yet, a Typhoon class nuclear ballistic missile submarine, captured by US satellite in 1982 alongside at Severodvinsk, the main Russian site of submarine construction and repair, in the days of the Soviet Union, and today. US Government, released 2012 by the National Reconnaissance Office / Public domainAnd the same spot almost 37 years later, with the last active Typhoon, Dmitry Donskoy TK-208.It used to be that the Chinese carrier program involved training mock-ups, fake carriers in amusement parks, and buying Soviet missile cruisers to use as hotels and casinos. That all changed when they bought the dead carrier hulk Varyag from Ukraine, and retrofitted it as the Liaoning. The facility above helped plan for the new naval program. A new carrier, a new class of amphibious assault ship, and massive building programs of surface combatants is transforming the People’s Liberation Army Navy.We stumbled across these Riga wrecks by complete accident…but they seemed relevant, and were added to the Russian / Soviet frigate page.ARA Santissima Trinidad, a British designed Type 42 Argentinian destroyer, capsized at Puerto Belgrano after long inactivity. The destroyer was supposed to have become a museum ship dedicated to the Falklands War, which she participated in.The SS United States appears in our post on the visible shipwreck of the SS America, as a comparison and product of the same naval architect, William Francis Gibbs. Classy lady, classy shadow!And now for something different, we have this new type of ship, made from converting a design for an oil tanker. We don’t know what it is, or what it does…but if an oil tanker wants to be some version of an amphibious warfare ship…then good for you, USS Lewis B. Puller!A highlight of the extensive USN retired destroyers page was this 1938 view of a four stacker USN destroyer at San Francisco…and we found more!Four months along the scrapping process near Brownsville, Texas, former USS Saratoga, CV-60, shows the stages a massive carrier is “broken”. We explored the scrapping of US supercarriers in our most popular single post and a more extensive stand-alone page a while back.Second World War views of Chatham Royal Navy Dockyards provided by the Kent County Council, allowed us to document some unanticipated views of Royal Navy ships, including this monitor, which looks like HMS Erebus, and another view that can be found on the RN page of HMS Argus.The fate of most ships in inactive status at a “warship boneyard” like Suisun Bay, California, is not a happy story. USS Iowa BB-61, Iowa class Battleship, by contrast, had groups bidding to preserve her as a museum ship. Since 2012 she has been moored at the Pacific Battleship Center, Los Angeles.Wreck and Replica of Dutch East India Company VOC Amsterdam (1748) together! Composite view with 2017/05 Amsterdam view of Netherlands Maritime Museum replica overlaid onto 2018/05 Bulverhythe Beach, UK, capture, from our new page on the Royal Netherlands Navy.USS George Washington CVN-73, Nimitz class nuclear-powered supercarrier, is displaying her powerful air complement. In our experience we see the aircraft surprisingly rarely in views of these ships in their home-ports.The wreck of LST-480 (Landing Ship – Tank), sunk during the West Loch disaster, Pearl Harbor 21 May 1944, which resulted in the tragic loss of at least 163 lives. Shipsearcher staff have tried very hard to track down many surviving LSTs.In the category of best Google Earth splicing errors: Two overlapping images gives the future INS Vikrant another 270′, making it fictitiously a 1,130 foot, double-islanded behemoth! HMS Queen Elizabeth beware!A wrecked museum ship, the former USS Inaugural minesweeper, makes of an oddly beautiful capture with the corrosion and tidelines patterning the hull.If you don’t love giant hospital ships, there may be something perverse about you. USNS Mercy, and sister-ship USNS Comfort, on the Atlantic coast, were not hard to find, and have been in the news quite a bit lately about the COVID-19 response. Stay safe and watch for U-boats!We all need more HMS Victory in the World, and we said as much in a post.
The Searchers 