Design 1047 was a series of plans for a class of Dutch battlecruisers
prior to the Second World War. The ships were intended to counter a
perceived threat posed by Imperial Japanese aggression to the Dutch
colonies in the East Indies. The 1047s were shaped by the need to be
able to fight their way though a fleet composed of heavy and light
cruisers, and smaller destroyers. It was hoped that this capability
would allow the battlecruisers to act as a fleet in being. A
preliminary plan was drawn up without foreign assistance, but as the
Royal Netherlands Navy had not previously designed a modern
capital ship, and the only information available on modern designs came
from public literature and editions of Jane's Fighting Ships, it was
missing many of the post-First World War advances in warship
technology. With assistance from Germany, a new design was formulated
by February 1940. A visit to Italy prompted a rethink of the internal
subdivision, which led to a set of drawings dated 19 April 1940. This
is the last known design produced prior to Germany's invasion and
occupation of the Netherlands. The ships were never constructed.
Read the rest of this article:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_1047_battlecruiser>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1012:
After refusing to allow himself to be ransomed for his freedom by his
Viking captors, Alphege was beaten to death by a mob in Greenwich, now
a suburb of London, the first Archbishop of Canterbury to die a violent
death.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86lfheah_of_Canterbury>
1782:
The States-General of the Dutch Republic received John Adams, and the
house he had purchased in the Hague became the first United States
embassy.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diplomatic_missions_of_the_United_States>
1943:
The Holocaust: Nazi troops entered the Warsaw Ghetto to round up the
remaining Jews, sparking the first mass uprising in Poland against the
Nazi occupation.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising>
1984:
Scottish-born composer Peter Dodds McCormick's "Advance Australia
Fair", a patriotic song that was first performed in 1878, officially
replaced "God Save the Queen" as Australia's national anthem.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Australia_Fair>
1995:
A car bomb destroyed much of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, US, killing 168 people and injuring over 800
others.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
skerry (n):
A small rocky island which is covered by the sea at high tide
<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/skerry>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
I share the belief of many of my contemporaries that the spiritual
crisis pervading all spheres of Western industrial society can be
remedied only by a change in our world view. We shall have to shift
from the materialistic, dualistic belief that people and their
environment are separate, toward a new consciousness of an
all-encompassing reality, which embraces the experiencing ego, a
reality in which people feel their oneness with animate nature and all
of creation.
--Albert Hofmann‎
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Hofmann%E2%80%8E>
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