WesWorld

Hi there...

Have you seen this?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/n…a-sea-indonesia

Yup, not just those ships but U.S.S. Houston has shown signs of salvage along with HMS Repulse and Prince of wales. HMS Exeter is also gone(!) while HMS Electra and HMS Encounter are almost completely salvaged as well. The U.S.S. Perch is also missing and even WW1 German and British wrecks have been pillaged. This actually makes my blood boil to be honest.....

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/n…enging-java-sea

Its a terrible thing to happen but how can anyone realistically police this?
I wouldn't have thought that old rusty steel would be worth much even as scrap metal?

Quoted from "Hood"

Its a terrible thing to happen but how can anyone realistically police this?

It'd be really manpower-intensive to police them all, I'd say. You count on general human decency to get you something, and look what results...

Quoted from "Hood"

I wouldn't have thought that old rusty steel would be worth much even as scrap metal?

I'm hardly an expert at it, but I think if the steel is thick enough, the outer layers of rust will slow down any further rusting deeper within the plates (kinda like a passivation treatment). So the thicker, high-grade steel of an old warship may still have a lot of good steel to... steal. And a modern steel furnace can process even old rusted steel fairly easily, so those ships are probably now high-rise apartments in China or Indonesia...

Brock is sadly right, in the right conditions (i.e wet with little to no oxygen) steel rusts much more slowly (hence why the Titanic is still fairly solid, when if she was above water, she would have rusted away by now).

High grade steel used for warships, as well as the non ferrous metals in items such as guns are highly valuable. The market for military memorabelia is also highly bouyant, especially for warships lost in action as items are always more scarce.

There's also extremely high demand for steel produced prior to the first nuclear detonations, for scientific applications, and the number one resource for that is old (even sunk) ships.