French battleship plans

[Lost_dreadnoughts]

The plans remain unavailable on the original site to due hacking, but Dreadnought Project has made a copy of some of them, available here

I found this while poking around for French info on the remains of SMS Thuringen.

Basically it seems that the the French equivalent of the NMM has scanned a lot of ship plans (original drawings with lots of info) and made them available online in TIFF format at no charge.

Trawling through the list of all types of ships, the following battleships have plans available:

Pre-Dreadnought
Bouvet, Massena, Jaureguiberry, Charlemagne, St Louis, Gaulois, I�na, Suffren, Liberte, Justice, Verite, Democratie, Danton, Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, Mirabeau, Vergniaud

Dreadnought
Jean Bart, Courbet, Paris, France, Lorraine, Bretagne, Provence, Bearn (as aircraft carrier)

Post WW1 Battleship
Clemenceau, Jean Bart, Richelieu

Amazing number of plans and incredible detail. Even if you don't know French it's pretty easy to navigate. I did find that not all battleships have the same type in French, some are B�timent de ligne, some Cuirasse and some Cuirasse d'escadre, I'm not sure of the difference.

Each ship has a "microfiche" index pdf page detailing the different plan sheets available and their filenames.

To give an idea of the quality, I just downloaded the first file for Jean Bart (Courbet class) and the image is 16476 x 5659 pixels at a resolution of 200picels per inch, making it approx 82" x 28" if you were to print it out with no resizing.

This is making me think seriously about scratch-building a french dreadnought as well as Royal Navy, USN or German Imperial Navy subjects.
Why can't the NMM do something like this???

Edit: Forgot to paste the link :heh: http://www.servicehistorique.sga.defens ... tebato.php


Edit January 20 2020: another possibility is this Internet Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20120113075 ... as/rec.php

[Roger T]

Why can't the NMM do something like this???

This came up last year. It's a question of funding - the French government lavishly funds their museums. The British government, for all of our vaunted obsession with history and heritage, does bugger-all via the abysmal Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS).

The situation can only get worse, as the DCMS pours untold billions into the 2012 Olympics, thus starving everything else of funds.

[Timmy C]

For now, this link appears to link to the plans: http://www.ss311.plus.com/french-warship-plans.html


Edit: Darn, looks like the plans they link to have been removed

[Jean-Paul Binot]

The French government lavishly funds their museums.

Well, maybe �lavishly� is a bit excessive. In France as elsewhere, most museums are struggling with rising costs and dwindling funding. It is true though that in general what is under the aegis of the central government is more or less adequately funded and certainly much more so than their British counterparts.

But as my British colleagues usually point out, this is the lasting consequence of the Thatcher years. British taxpayers have come to expect perpetually low tax (relatively to continental practices at least). In economy, there is no miracle. Something has to give in.