Can someone please explain what is wrong exactly with this book?
The AOTS Iowa book is essentially Super Drawings in 3D plus some anatomy. The 3d exterior renderings are fine. The problem is that the anatomy stuff is largely pure fiction. Even some of the exterior material is wrong, such as the hull form and plating. The reality is, that an olde style AOTS book would take a decade of research to do . Now one person is churning them out about every other year—and it shows.
And when I say "pure fiction" I don't mean a bulkhead here and there is off or a doorway has been accidentally omitted. I mean that things are totally wrong. Many of these gross errors could have been avoided by a tour of one of the Iowa-class.
I have given a long list of issues before but so I will give just one example here. Turret 3 is at a half frame location. Near turret 3 the framing shifts from numbered frame locations to half frame locations to support the turret. That would be a key "anatomy" feature to point out. But the book has an illustration of a frame in this area (forgot the exact number) that does not even exist.
Since then the new book on Iowa-class armor has come out and, if you compare the two, you will find a multitude of additional discrepancies between them just on that one topic.
To illustrate how bad information keeps circulating, I asked the author about why his armor book says the Iowa-class belt tapers to 1-inch at the bottom while EVERY other source (Wikipedia, AOTS, even Sumrall) says it's 1.62-inches. He sent me a blueprint showing the lower belt is tapered to one inch at the bottom.
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