Navagation lights

[Oldgoat 88]

Built the Hoga Tug boat great kit BUT this was at Pearl Harbor 12/7 made it a scale to my ability to work. Not a navy man but had 26 and 28 footers on the cape All required Nav lights
this kit had on Nav lights???? is this standard for navel ships during war time (just asking )

 

[AllanKP69]

There is a bit of history to the use of navigation lights. In wartime the display of navigation lights can be a tactical decision, as they can make a vessel more visible to the enemy, potentially attracting unwanted attention. I wonder if this could also carry over into peace time as well,when govenment vessels are out to apprehend other vessels engaged in illegal activities. Hopefully former navy or coast guard folks here at SoS will have better information.
Allan

 

[Bob Cleek]

Built the Hoga Tug boat great kit BUT this was at Pearl Harbor 12/7 made it a scale to my ability to work. Not a navy man but had 26 and 28 footers on the cape All required Nav lights
this kit had on Nav lights???? is this standard for navel ships during war time (just asking )

As Allan explained, navigation lights can be turned off for tactical reasons (e.g. "running dark" in areas patrolled by submarines,) but the lights are always there, whether turned on or not. Having no nav lights is not normal at any time, peace or war.

I am quite familiar with Hoga. (I surveyed her and prepared one of the unsuccessful proposals for her donation as an historic vessel. Considering the competition was San Francisco and Pearl Harbor, how she ended up in North Little Rock, AK, I'll never know!) Hoga was launched eleven months prior to December 7, 1941. Her pre-war construction did not reflect any wartime deviations from the ordinary.

Hoga has always had her navigation lights in the customary position for a tug. She has her steaming lights on her mast and her port and starboard running lights mounted on light boards port and starboard on the forward ends of the pilothouse roof. These appear to have been in this position from the time of her launch through the present. See below pictures:











Now, the kit manufacturer's omission of the running lights in this instance may be an omission resulting from a drafting error in the Woban Class general plans booklet. Here's the USN's Booklet of General Plans, 1944, for the Woban Class tugs below. The PDF is high-pixel quality and can be enlarged by holding down your "control" key and turning your mouse wheel. Interestingly, although all the photos of the vessel throughout her long life show the running lights on the pilothouse roof, port and starboard, the Booklet of General Plans, while depicting every nav light on the Woban Class vessels, omits the port and starboard ("directional") running light entirely. I have no explanation for this omission other than 1) carelessness or 2) they were considered so standardized as to be assumed and therefore the detail was omitted. Given the depiction of the other nav lights, and the ease with which the directional sidelingts could have been drawn, I'm going to go with "carelessness."

Even so, it's difficult to believe that the experts who created the kit overlooked this detail as well. Some kit builders prefer kits because they don't have to do the research necessary to get a model done correctly and they don't mind things like missing running lights because they are only modeling for their own satisfaction. It's their model and they can do with it what they wish, but it's my opinion, and it's my opinion that a model without running lights properly installed is a model that isn't finished yet.

See: https://maritime.org/doc/plans/ytb142.pdf

 

[Roger Pellett]

While we’re on the subject perhaps you can help solve a mystery.

The Great Lakes steamship Benjamin Noble was launched at the Wyandot Michigan shipyard of the American Shipbuilding Company in 1909. Designed to carry pulpwood she was able to transit locks in the Welland Canal to reach Canadian paper mills on Lake Ontario. She was steel hulled.

A contemporary Great Lakes Register lists her as having a “lighting plant;” an electric generator. All other auxiliary machinery was steam driven. Original American Shipbuilding drawings also show a lamp room as part of her forward cabin layout.

A lamp room was a place where oil (kerosene) lamps were stored maintained and filled with fuel before being put in place and lit. This special room isolated the flammable kerosene from open flames elsewhere in the ship.

So, here’s the mystery. If she had a lighting plant, why the lamp room? Were there laws that required navigation lights to be oil fired instead of lit by electricity? Were oil lamps required to be carried as backups? When did electric navigation lights become common?

Roger