About hulls.fyi

It started with a conversation about the B-2 bomber — two pilots flying 44-hour missions, shift-sleeping on a cot behind the cockpit, eating cold rations, using a chemical toilet. "Adrenalized submariners," the crews called themselves.

That phrase stuck. And it led to an obvious question: what about actual submariners? What about the crews of destroyers riding out typhoons, merchant mariners on Liberty Ships with the highest casualty rate of any U.S. service, oystermen on Chesapeake skipjacks — the last commercial sailing fleet in North America?

Every vessel reference site describes tonnage and beam and armament. Nobody describes what it smelled like below decks on a Gato-class submarine in the Pacific, or what it felt like when the ramp dropped on a Higgins boat at Normandy, or what 900 men experienced in the water for four days after the USS Indianapolis went down.

hulls.fyi is about vessels the way wings.fyi is about aircraft — the machines, yes, but also the human dimension. What these hulls carried, what they endured, and what it cost the people inside them.

The companion to mahogany.fyi, which celebrates the craftsmanship of wooden boats. Hulls covers the full spectrum — from PT boats to container ships, from skipjacks to nuclear submarines.