Читать книгу Deeper into the Darkness онлайн

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They then found A turret, complete with its barbette, standing some way away from the bow, with sections of the tripod foremast and spotting top beside it.

At the stern, the propeller shafts were bent, and one of the ship’s propellers was found lying free of the ship and was lifted. The three other propellers were subsequently blown off and lifted to the surface.

The 10-inch-thick vertical main armour belt plates were very valuable and had been blown apart. This made them easy for the salvors to lift, in comparison to the German High Seas Fleet battleships nearby where the vertical armour belts were still firmly in place. On the German battleships, salvors had to blast their way into the ship through the unarmoured sections of hull bottom and get into the coal bunkers, which were directly behind the armour belt. Here, explosive charges were placed to blow the 25-ton plates off one by one, for stropping and lifting to the surface.

The 25-foot-long 28-ton condensers were blasted out and removed from Vanguard’s turbine rooms. A number of valuable Weir pumps were also recovered. These large pumps stood vertically inside the ship and at the top of the pump was a cylinder that held a piston powered by steam from the boilers. Weir pumps were used for pumping many different fluids around the ship, such as oil, firemain (water for firefighting), condensate and bilge. Weir pumps also fed water into the boilers to make steam and power the turbines – the boilers had to be regularly topped up with water recycled from the turbines via the condensers.