Trumpeter Liberty Ship conversion

There are more conversions possible than I could try to list here, but unfortunately an attack transport is not one of them. APAs and AKAs were converted from faster ships, while the Liberty ships were employed in roles where speed was less of an issue. To give you an idea of the number of possibilities here is a quick list of types where the Navy employed Liberty ships (WWII and postwar):

AG
AGM/T-AGM
AGR/YAGR
AK
AKN
AKS
AP
AR
ARG
ARV
AVS
AW
IX
T-AKV
YAG

For wartime merchant ships, you can do conversions to represent ships other than the O’Brien. There were actually a lot of differences between ships, with details such as gun tubs changing from yard to yard. There were also a variety of defense systems that were employed on these ships, with the most common being torpedo nets.

Another possibility is to do another variant of the Liberty ship. There were actually several types of Liberty ships built, all of which shared a common hull and machinery. These include tank or boxed aircraft transports, tankers, and colliers. Add to these postwar civilian and government modifications. In commercial use they often had changes done to the superstructure, and were even enlarged by welding in new sections of hull. Liberty ships have been employed in just about every conceivable use, including container ships, pipe and cable layers, mine testing ship (powered by four aircraft turbo-prop engines mounted on pylons!), barges, floating piers, fish processing plants, and even as a floating nuclear power plant.

Basically if you collect all the variants of all 2,710 of the Liberty ships, you easily have more than 10,000 conversions (some minor, some not) that are possible. This does not even take into account the other classes of ships used by allied nations with essentially the same hull, such as the Oceans, Forts, and Parks.

Regards,

Chris Friedenbach
Crewmember, SS Jeremiah O’Brien.

since the Jerimiah O'Brien lives practically in my back yard, that's the ship I'll be modeling

Actually, I thought it might be cool to do a post war civilian version... Maybe for Swedish America or United States Lines, nearly every great shipping company ran them and a lot of them were sailing into the 70s. Some of these after the war had alterations that were little more than removing the guns, others a bit more extensive. The beauty of this kit is there are literally thousands of versions to be made from it, unfortunatly this is an area with almost non-existant documentation with the ones that came to the Great Lakes after the enlarging of the seaway in 1959 are probably the easiest to research. All we need now is a Victory and a T-2 tanker to offer thousands more possibilities!

I HEARTILY second the motion for at least a 1/350th Victory ship!!!!! The only one currently out there that I am aware of the the 1/700th resin kit from Loose Cannon Productions. It is an excellent build - I am on my second one - but if you're going to present it to a World War II veteran, they simply won't be able to see a lot of the details at that small scale :( .

I visited the O'Brien recently and noticed what looked like a concrete applique on the gun tubs and parts of the superstructure. Anyone know why this was done?

The concrete-like material is actually a plastic armor invented by the British and made from a mixture of bitumen (road tar) and granite chippings. Concrete has a tendency to splinter when shot, while the bitumen absorbs the round. The granite chippings give it with a bit more structure to prevent sagging. To fabricate the armor a mold was built around the supporting steel structure, and then the armor material was poured hot into the mold and allowed to cool.

The idea was to gain armor protection for critical areas while conserving steel- the use of this armor allowed these areas to be built using steel as thin as 1/4". On Liberty ships it was typically applied around the chart room, wheel house, radio room, 20mm gun tubs, and barrage balloon helium storage lockers (if fitted).

Regards,

Chris Friedenbach
Crewmember, SS Jeremiah O’Brien

Thank you, Chris, and thank you all for your work in maintaining the O'Brien!

What I find interesting to contrast between the Liberty and Victory ships is the level and types of crew protection - at least the Liberty ships made some effort, crude though it was, to provide extra protection on the vital ship areas.
All the Victory ships had was the regulation 1/4-inch or so of mild steel between the crews and assorted bombs, shells, torpedos, etc.

Cruichin, thanks for the thank you. It can be a lot of work, but it is also a lot of fun.

Mfsob, this just goes to show how the Victory ship design was geared towards postwar use, while the Liberty ship was product of wartime expediency. The armor protection was really only good against a strafing attack or a near miss, and wouldn’t be any use against something like a bomb or a kamikaze. Except for the helmsman and radio operator the armor didn’t offer the crew much protection during an attack. The watch officer or captain, lookouts, gunners, and ammunition handlers still had to be outside to do their jobs. For most of the crew the protection was no better than on a Victory ship. During the Normandy landings the captain of the O’Brien was so concerned over the thin steel deck over his quarters that he had the crew pile the area with sandbags.

One of the major problems with the armored wheelhouse (and possibly why it was omitted from the Victory ship design) was the way it restricted visibility. Unless the ship is operating alone in open waters the wheelhouse on Liberty ship is pretty well useless. It is interesting to note that the Jeremiah O’Brien is always operated from the flying bridge during her cruises, while (from what I hear) the flying bridge on the Lane Victory is seldom if ever used.

Regards,

Chris Friedenbach
Crewmember, SS Jeremiah O’Brien

You're right, Chris, I should have followed my thought all the way through. It must have wandered off ... again.

And you are correct about the Victory ships seldom being operated from the flying bridge. My Dad was a helmsman (among many other things) and he said about the only time that was used was for docking in a strange port because the height made for marginally better visibility, and the after steering station was never used that he could recall.

The after steering station is not really useful for anything under normal operating conditions. It is basically there as a backup- the steering gear is hydraulically actuated from the wheelhouse, and if there is a leak and the hydraulic system goes down the after steering provides a direct link to the steering engine. I have heard a number of wartime stories where a hydraulic problem led to the after steering station having to be used, and this even happened to the O’Brien in 1996.

Regards,

Chris Friedenbach
Crewmember, SS Jeremiah O’Brien

Thre is little dif in the hulls of the liberty ships and the hulls of the CND Park and the BRIT Forts and you could easly do maintenance ships like HMS Hartland Point ,Berry Head , Mull of Kintyre Lots pic of these ships on RN web sites I lived on one in Singapore for 4 months with no A/C Hell was never so hot

One interesting looking conversion could be the Granville Hall, a ship used for radioactive fallout experiments during the Cold War- there's a picture at:
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/kn10000/kn12831.jpg
Andrew