A while back we posted about reaching the milestone of a thousand shipsearcher warship views, and pointed to some of the most interesting captures and ship stories. We have now found more than 3,000 warships using open satellite imagery, and added these to the Shipsearcher database of pages! We continued our mission to travel the World and the Seven Seas to document 24 more navies, and added a special consolidated page of large or notable naval units from all smaller navies.* During 2021, we welcomed more than 20,000 visitors to our pages, with about 50,000 views.
We created a release history page, so that visitors can see when pages/navies were added to the project, with all pages hyperlinked. We hope to do updates when/if we can. We know for some navies, such as the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy, the pace of new additions to the fleet has rendered the information dated as soon as it came out! The images below link to the relevant page. It’s a hyperlink-rich environment, folks, so click often and please share!
The major Chinese naval development of the recent era is the Type 03 carrier, which is roughly the size of the first US supercarriers of the 1950s, and larger than what any other country has yet produced. Recently released imagery shows the state of construction near Shanghai. A project that began as a quick look at active and retired United States Navy carriers has now documented more than 50 World navies, from the largest carriers to museum and sail training ships, down to large patrol boats. We also went back and retrospectively added in pages for submarines into the arrangement of every navy that operates these nefarious boats!
The resource has a total of more than 400 pages. Navy index pages (found under shipsearcher menu above) lead to sub-categories of warships. We also built pages for supercarrier scrapping and Chinese island fortress construction, and terms of use and sources for our images, which also explains how we go about trying to identify ships. Recently, we took a side trip to document the World’s sailing warships and replicas, and fairly ridiculous pirate ships!
The French replica of the frigate Hermione, the ship that brought the Marquis de Lafayette to America during the Revolution, showing her lovely lines and towering rig. This and about a hundred other sailing warships of various types can be seen at the newly added page!Using the search box 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 since our last round-up post? Check out below, with links to posts and pages, and keep exploring the database!
One of the most important discoveries we feel we made was the fate of the last WW2 US Navy Barnegat seaplane tender known to exist. USS Orca, a Pacific war veteran, was transferred to Ethiopia and served as the flagship. It fled to Yemen in 1991 during the civil war, with much of the fleet. We located the last views of this veteran behind the contested Yemeni port of Hodeidah, and added it to our small navies, great ships pages.
We’ve been pretty interested in the fake Iranian carrier at Bandar Abbas since we first added it to the carriers pages, and we have continued to follow her interesting life. This shows the last views of her before she was again destroyed in an Iranian swarming attack exercise.
A rare example of a 1930s coastal submarine, the Finish Navy’s Vesikko is displayed, with interesting camouflage, in Helsinki. This sub and others can be found at the small navies submarine page.
The former German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, recommissioned as the USS Prinz Eugen for the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, is capsized, with the wreck in deeper water towards the bow. The good news is all the hazardous oil remaining in the wreck was removed a few years ago!
We are also interested in any aerial photography we can locate, and will use it to source older views of ships. Here, two Cleveland Class light cruisers are laid up in the Pacific reserve fleet at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, 1960 [Detail of NH 888083] Courtesy of the Naval History and Heritage Command
And to accompany the above, an early aerial loaded in Google Earth catalogue of similar Cleveland class cruisers just after WW2. Note the outboard ship shows the large hangar space at the stern of these cruisers.
How do you turn a fishing trawler into a guided missile frigate? Well, Cuba has a long history of making do with what equipment they have on hand. This view shows the addition of the helicopter flight deck aft and missile tubes forward – One of the more interesting frigates found in our small navies – great ships pages.
HMVS / HMAS Cerberus breakwater. This hulk of a unique “Breastwork Monitor,” probably the last remaining type of this craft, has an important history in the establishment of the Australian naval service.
Pirates of the Caribbean fans will be appalled that we titled this as the wrong pirate ship! Of course this is actually the movie ship the Flying Dutchman, which we believe to be a creative interpretation of both the Swedish royal warship Vasa, and something really, really bad. Enjoy this and our other pirate ships!
We have an interest in hydrofoils, and tracked down these elderly Russian-designed boats in Vietnam. This Vietnamese navy Turya / Project 206M class Hydrofoil torpedo boat is at Nah Trang.
The HTMS Phosampton, decommissioned and awaiting either preservation or destruction. This is the World’s last existing Algerine class Second World War minesweeper, formerly HMS Minstrel. We wrote both a post and added this to the relevant page.
Dom Fernando II e Glória at Lisbon. A remarkable 50-gun frigate built in then-Portuguese India and commissioned in 1845.
HTMS Thonburi artifacts, arranged in an interesting way that replicates the forward spaces of this powerful coastal defence ship. The “emerging from a tree” thing was probably not the original intention!
The new and beautiful Omani sail training ship Shabab Oman II (2014)
We found a creative place to slot this view of the Titanic replica under construction in Daying County, China, choosing to use it to illustrate sister-ships Olympic and Britannic, that served respectively as a troop transport and a hospital ship. The replica is up to deck level, with speculation about whether it will ever be completed.*As a general – sometimes disregarded -convention, navies with 3 or more frigates, or a mix of a destroyer or submarines, or a powerful force of corvettes or ocean patrol vessels, have their own pages, while notable ships from other navies get added to the “Small Navies – Great Ships” pages.
The Searchers 