Giant Floating Victorian Drydock

29 pointsposted 2 days ago
by dtj1123
(mastermariners.org.au)

17 Comments

Luc

2 hours ago

The rigging on the surrounding ships is nonsensical. AI generated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Admiralty_floating_doc...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/HMS_Psyc...

helsinkiandrew

2 hours ago

It looks like a (modern or old) version of this print: "The Bermuda Floating Dock, In Tow of H.M.Ss Warrior and Black Prince and Terrible astern Leaving Porto Santo for their Voyage across the Atlantic, July 4th 1869"

https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/maritime-history/library-archi...

jtbayly

an hour ago

I don’t get it. It sounds like you are claiming the article image is not AI slop, but rather an old print. But then you link to something that isn’t even remotely like the article image.

helsinkiandrew

19 minutes ago

It was common for paintings/etchings to be made based on existing paintings in the 19th century - I'm guessing the painting link I gave was probably close to an original or source.

There's lots of similar images on the internet, this image on Alamy claims to scanned from a Victorian mechanical‑engineering book of the 1880s

https://www.alamy.com/an-old-engraving-showing-the-british-f...

Leonard_of_Q

2 hours ago

Not to mention the presence of two small boats which are not the type you'd want to cross an ocean in.

terhechte

3 hours ago

There's a couple of great images in this article:

https://nmb.bm/history/look-down-look-down/

andai

an hour ago

This is one of the coolest things I have ever seen.

xnx

an hour ago

This should be the link.

moffkalast

2 hours ago

This photo looks so odd: https://nmb.bm/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/IMG_011057-1536x13...

Were cameras at the time really that good already? Or was it likely restored with some creative license?

pixelesque

2 hours ago

Yes, as long as you were happy to wait 30s for an exposure (on tripod), by 1850 (most of those photos were > 15 years later than that) there were many photos of good quality.

Look at photos of Crystal Palace in 1851 for example.

jukujala

4 hours ago

I asked Claude if the designs still survived and got the following. I wondered if we can replicate the drydock.

"The National Archives (Kew) This is the most significant holding. The National Archives holds Admiralty record ADM 195/5, which is a collection of 73 photographs of the Bermuda Dockyard dated 1868–1899, explicitly including the floating dock. (nationalarchives) The National Museum of Bermuda confirms that photographs from the National Archives UK include images of the floating dock under construction at Blackwall Yard in 1868, the dock en route to Bermuda with HMS Terrible astern, and HMS Urgent docked inside it circa 1870–1890. (Nmb) Admiralty construction contracts and engineering correspondence would sit in the ADM series as well — the National Archives holds all Admiralty records from that era."

Full answer here https://claude.ai/share/2702a011-49f9-4d9b-be38-c2e1afd214b5