New Book: Armor of the Iowa-Class Battleships

[SteveSmith]

The second volume in J. Miano's series on the Iowa-class battleships out: Armor of the Iowa-class Battleships. I got mine from Lulu.com. The author says those have the best print quality. The book has just appeared on Amazon as well but those use a different printer.

The book is nearly 400 pages devoted to just armor so the detail level is overwhelming. The measurements for every individual armor plate are given. The book covers the structural connections between the armor and the rest of the ship. It also covers how the armor was installed. There appear to be about 700 illustrations. Most are diagrams drawn for the book. Some are original plans. There are photographs to illustrate the armor in place. There are some 3D renderings for things that could not be shown in photographs. The differences between the various ships are shown.

The book corrects a lot of errors that have appeared in print and had a life of their own. One example is that the belt armor is repeatedly described as tapering to 1.62". It does not. The armor tapers to 1" (and would not fit otherwise). Another example is that the conning tower is frequently described as an ellipse (and kits tend to depict it as an ellipse). In reality, it is made up of four arcs so it is deeper at the sides than it would be as an ellipse.

This is the the most detailed book on ships that I have ever seen. The level of detail is such that, with no exaggeration, you could use this book to build the armor for your own Iowa-class battleship. Normies might find the amount of detail in this book to be too much. For die hard naval fans, this book shows that many the under-the-covers depictions of the Iowa-class battleships in print are simply wrong.

[SteveSmith]

The author posted on SN that due to a printer problem of some kind, the book will only be available from LULU.COM and from museum bookstores.

https://www.lulu.com/shop/john-miano/ar ... r9wkg.html

I called the author for explanation. He said he uses two printers for different distributions. LULU is one and they have the best quality but do not distribute large books through Amazon and similar. The printer that does distribute through Amazon specifies a maximum of 400 pages. The book is 386 pp. Now they say they can only do 340 pp. Rather than cut the book down, he decided to just let LULU do the printing and ordering.

[marcelo_malara]

Thanks for the recomendation!