Quote:
Originally Posted by Olefin
and their engines can burn bunker oil - you dont need refined products for their engines - you could take it straight out of a oil well and a BB would run on it
|
I don't doubt this point, especially pre-modification. They had boilers to generate steam, which powered steam turbines. I'm no steam engineer but presumably these sorts of boilers can be powered by a variety of liquid fuels. My guess is that until the 1980s the Iowa-class BBs were run on heavy, low grade bunker oil. So why were they converted during the 1980s to burn navy distillate fuel? Obviously if the existing burners and boilers could already handle the slightly more refined and processed navy distillate fuel a conversion wouldn't have been necessary. Did the conversion make it any harder to go back to using low grade bunker oil? Was the conversion itself in any way complicated or requiring of complicated components? Was it for some odd reason like pressure to make the older USN vessels less polluting? Was it to improve their fuel efficiency/range?
These questions probably aren't important to the original discussion but I haven't been able to glean the answers with Google-Fu so far.